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Animals Are My Life

DEN TIERN GEHORT MEIN HERZ
(Hamburg 1955)

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE
(London 1956)

LORENZ 1IAGENBECK

ANIMALS

ARE MY
LIFE

Lorenz Hagenbeck

TRANSLATED BY

Alec Brown

_THE BODLEY HEAD LONDON

First published in England

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of
private study, research, criticism or review, as per-
mitted under the Copyright Act igi 1 , no portion
may be reproduced by any process without written
permission .Enquiry should be made to the publisher.

Printed in Great Britain by

The Garden City Press Limited, Letchworth, Hertfordshire
for John Lane The Bodley Head Limited
28 Little Russell Street , /one/on, W.C.I.

Animals Are My Life

CONTENTS

Page

Preface 1 3

'Not one of these Caravan Folk* I g

The Indian 's Wealth the Elephant 33

On the Pike' at St. Louis, U.S.A. 48

South- West with Two Thousand Dromedaries 65

Patent No. 91,492 Becomes Reality 77

The First Sea-Elephants come to Germany 84

Troublesome Heritage the Animal Park 93

Wartime Circuses with and without Tents i o 2

We Become Billionaires 1 1 r,

The Great Battle of Stellingen 124

The Devil Dancers Capture Scandinavia 136

From Tears to Laughter 146

The Ocean Brings a Fairy Ship I 54

Marvelling at Kirin 1 6 2

Destroyed by Typhoon 1 6 8

Melancholy Tea with Mr. Wong 1 74

A Maharaja Fills the House 183

No Piastres for Hagenbeck 193

Locusts Halt the Circus Train 199

'Men, Animals, Sensations' 210

Bombs on Animal Paradise 2 1 6

Elephant Protest at Malmo 223

Onagers have the Devil in Them 233

We'll Shoot at Hagenbeck's 244

Break Down the Frontiers ! 248

ILLUSTRATIONS

Frontispiece

Lorenz Hagenbeck.

Facing page

1 6 (a) Grandfather begins with seals in St. Pauli.

(b) Unpacking and weighing snakes, tortoises and crocodiles
at the Neuer Pferdemarkt.

1 7 My father, Carl Hagenbeck.

(below) My grandfather, G. C. C. Hagenbeck.

32 Animals which in Nature never meet: a performing group
bringing together polar bears, lions and brown bears.

3 3 (left) Black Eagle, Sioux Chief, in full war paint.

(right) Somali Prince Hersy Egeh, whose son attended our
Stellingen primary school.

64 A rattlesnake dangerously poisonous: the annular horny
growth at the tip of the tail, which causes the rattle, can
clearly be seen.

65 Some of the inmates of Stellingen: King Penguins, and
(above) a Sea-Elephant.

80 Our Igorots stare in amazement at our St. Louis Arctic Panorama.

(below) Peaceful watering : the scene only a few seconds before
our elephants stampeded at Des Moines.

8 1 A lion on its way to the circus ring.

1 1 2 My father and his favourite walrus ; a painting by Lovis Corinth
(Hamburg Art Gallery).

(below) Together with my brother, Heinrich, I receive Kaiser
Wilhelm II at Stellingen. On the right, with walking-stick, is
Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin.

ILLUSTRATIONS
Facing page

113 Stellingen's Zoological sensation of 192^! Goliath the Sea-
Elephant.

128 A giant of the jungle holds her foot with three and a half tons
weight behind it over her trainer 's head, but little Uwe does
not fear for his father; he knows he himself can handle the
gentle Roma.

(below) Aquatic delights in Stellingen's elephant pool: ample
water and a good mud wallow are essentials in an elephant's
toilet.

129 Lulu Gauticr on his Lipizzaner mount Favory Maestoso.

144 Mosques and Singhalese villages at Stellingen. Such accurate
reconstructions formed the background to our famous shows
of Peoples of the World. Here we see Arabs outside a typical
* oasis town.'

(below) A dwarf zebu in harness in a typical village scene. In
this setting more than one early German film was made.

14^ 'Black on white.' Zebras were once called * tiger-horses'.

1 60 Rudolf Jurkschat, his Arab steed and team of twelve, a great
feature of our touring circus.

(below) Richard Sawade with his lions and tigers at Hagenbeck's
Animal Park, Stellingen.

1 6 1 A bird's-eye view of our canvas town whether at home or in
far-off Tokyo, perfect order was the rule.

(below) Meni, our working elephant, handled many a load of
circus material.

176 A ten-thousand-tonner is transformed into a Noah's Ark.
Loading the s.s. Saarland at Hamburg, for Yokohama.

(below) Clownish business under the aegis of the Pyramids.

177 * Hagenbeck's,' the round-the-world circus, in Japan.
(centre) After the typhoon at Hakata (Kyushu).
(bottom) Performances continued in the open air.

192 The Royal Tiger's incisors are razor-sharp.

ILLUSTRATIONS
Facing page

193 Tiger trainer Rudolf Matthies at work. The tiger in this
picture is leaping through an eigh teen-inch hoop.

224 The end of the Berlin Deutschland Hall. Without any panic,
an audience of fifteen thousand persons followed each other
outside, while the men hauled out the mobile cages with lions
and tigers.

225 A lady giraffe haughtily steps out of her well-cushioned special
coach.

(right) Richard Sawade's pet tiger surprises a noisy party in a
deck cabin during one of our voyages.

240 My brother Heinrich Hagenbeck with polar bears and a walrus
at Stellingen.

(below) Three generations of Hagenbecks. Standing, left to
right: Carl Heinrich Hagenbeck (nephew of Lorenz Hagen-
beck), Erich Hagenbeck (son), Mrs. Heike Hagenbeck (wile of
Carl Heinrich), Mrs. Else Hagenbeck (wife), Dietrich Hagenbeck
(grandson). Sitting: Lorenz Hagenbeck, Evelyn Hagenbeck
(grand-daughter) .

241 A valuable passenger from the Persian salt desert. The first
onager foal to set foot in Hamburg being led from the aircraft
by my nephew, Carl Heinrich and my grandson, Dietrich.

PREFACE

A TUB of seals at St. Pauli more than a century ago was the beginning
of Carl Hagenbeck's. In 1 848, some Elbe fishermen happened to catch
six seals in their net. They delivered their catch to my grandfather,
Gottfried Clas Carl Hagenbeck, who was a fishmonger. He had the
lucky idea of putting those seals on show for a small charge in his
backyard in St. Pauli.

Neither he nor the Hamburg idlers then guessed that the name of
his eldest son, Carl my father would go down in the history of
zoos and circuses as the initiator of the 'kindness training method* and
the founder of the first free-quarters animal park in the world. My
father's book, Of Beasts and Men, which has appeared in many lan-
guages, tells the story of the adventurous rise of our firm. It remains
for me, his youngest son, to tell the no less gripping subsequent story
of our enterprise.

My elder brother, Heinrich, built it up with my assistance, and I
shall be happy if by these reminiscences I can at the same time keep
his memory alive. It is to him that our Stellingen Animal Park owes
its present-day form. It was Heinrich who, with an animal park far
larger and finer than Father had first dreamed, set up a lasting memorial.

Four generations of Stellingen Hagenbecks have worked together on
this enterprise, which has comprised animal park, animal catching,
trade in animals and a circus. Together these have transformed the
name of an unknown village into what in the twentieth century is
among animal-lovers throughout the world a definite concept of zoo
work.

I dedicate this book to my nephew Carl Heinrich and my grandson
Dietrich, in the hope that they will both continue to make it their
calling to mediate between animals and men.

Stellingen, Hamburg, LORENZ HAGENBECK

March

'NOT ONE OF THESE CARAVAN FOLK 1

ON MY fifth birthday, my grandfather, who lived in a little ivy-covered
cottage in Sternschanz Street, brought me a whopping big parcel. He
had had a saddler make me a fine fat leather 'rocking elephant.' This
put me into a terrible dilemma. I was torn between the desire to rock
on my elephant and another passion, which already had me in thrall
to admire my circus I For my father had given me a perfect little scale
model of the first 'Hagenbeck Travelling Circus,' which that very
evening he was to open for its first performance on the open ground
known as the 'Holy Ghost Field.'*

Yes, the passion was already there.

From my earliest memories the word Circus has inflamed my ima-
gination. How well I recall those little models with which my parents
surprised me. They were in perfect detail. I can still see that 'big top'
my first its brightly painted wagons and its animals. Nothing was
missing, from the monkeys' cage to the brass band musicians with
cockades in their cocked hats.

That evening, when the real circus opened, there was no holding
my sisters older than I was or myself, for excitement, and we
simply burned with envy of my brother Heinrich, who was seven
years my senior. For my father had given him permission to take part
that evening in the very first item, the Hungarian Post parade, in
which he was to appear on his quick-footed little pony.

I think my mother was in fact the only member of our household
who was not beside herself with excitement. She, I remember, kept
peering up across the coffee-pot and out of the window. I wondered
why she was so anxious. But there was a keen wind outside, the ropes
lashed noisily against our flagstaff, and the handful of people who came
that afternoon to see our little menagerie had to go chasing their hats
as they emerged from the yard into the wind-swept street.

Suddenly there was the clatter of hoofs outside ! Then, what did we

see but our own ostler, driving before him a confused troop of camels,

horses and circus ponies, their manes all wild with the wind. Swiftly

my mother flung open the window. The curtains blew into the room.

* Heiligengeistfeld.

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

We heard the man shouting. Then suddenly we all knew that a sud-
den burst of the gale had brought our big circus tent in confusion to
the ground.

We children all fell a-weeping, from sheer disappointment, of
course. It was not till long after that I learned that we nearly had real
cause for grief that night ; under a falling mast my father had escaped
death by a mere hair's breadth.

What was it turned my father into a wanderer on the face of the
world? For his whole life was travel. He visited every clime and his
men caught animals for him in every land. Was he not 'by appoint-
ment* Court Supplier to the Emperor of Germany, to the Emperors
of Austria-Hungary and Russia too, also to the Sultan of Morocco and
the fabulous Mikado of Japan?

My mother told Heinrich and me the story many times. Her
acquaintance with my father had an early beginning. It went right
back to the time when she being the child of a near neighbour
together with Father she gutted sprats for smoking at the back of my
grandfather's fish shop in Hamburg. Nobody knew better than Mother
the arduous, diligent life which Father had had, to rise from the small-
est beginnings to the position which in the English press earned him
the title of The King of Menagerie Owners/

Then the Sudan uprising of the Mahdi broke out, and at one blow
the African animal trade which had become Father's source of income
was crippled. The resilience and drive of a man of Hanseatic forbears
was called for to get that Hamburg big-game traffic going again. Far
into the night burned the paraffin lamp over the desk where Father
kept maps covering the whole world, and it was not long before there
were new telegraphic orders flying in all directions. The Norwegian
ship's captain Adrian Jacobsen, who in 1878 in his brig the Walrus
brought Father the first Eskimos ever to visit Germany and, what is
more, exhibited them to the Emperor Wilhelm I was now sent to
Alaska to fetch some Bella Coola Indians. Behnke, another of our
travellers, had to go off to the Volga basin to fetch members of the
Kalmyk nation. Essler, a Hungarian who had spent years of his life as
a slave at the court of King Theodor of Ethiopia, was dispatched to
the Congo.

The reason for all this was that in Europe an interest in colonial ex-
pansion had suddenly been awakened, and exhibitions of exotic living
races drew enormous crowds. At that time, do not forget, neither
illustrated magazines nor cinemas had been invented. My father sent

Grandfather

k-giris

with

seals

St. Paul)

Unpacking

and

weighing
snakes,
tortoises

and

crocodiles

at the

Neuer

Plerdt-nurkt

Unloading
a consign-
ment from
Africa

from the
angina]
drawings

Heinnch
I cutemann

Left: My Grandfather,
G. C. C. HAGENBECK

'NOT ONE OF THESE CARAVAN FOLK*

his best man and personal friend, Joseph Menges, who had just played
a conspicuous part in General Gordon's expedition to Khartoum, to
India, to bring that continent into the ambit of his traffic in big game.
Menges scouted, and knowledgeable travellers followed on and made
all the arrangements.

Three years later it needed mounted police in Berlin to control the
mass of ninety- three thousand visitors who surged to see the great Carl
Hagenbeck's 'Folk Exhibition of Kalmyks and Singhalese.' Father's
ethnographic shows had certainly rung the bell. A year later came the
'Grand Ceylon Show,' which included twenty-five Indian working
elephants* with first-rate ethnographical material. The magnificent
Perra-Harra procession, with parade elephants, made painters, ethno-
graphers, press and general public alike wildly enthusiastic. The old

* A sharp distinction is to be made between elephants trained to work (mainly of
Indian origin) and elephants trained to perform of both Indian and African origin.
Translator.

2 AML

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

Moorweiden Hall, opposite the site of the modern Dammtor station,
could not hold enough people. A triumphant tour through all the
principal cities of Europe followed.

All this, of course, brought my father more and more fame. At the
same time, however, my maternal Uncle Heinrich Mehrmann sighed
over the accounts, permanently horrified by the expenses sheet or
sheets. Fares and freight, insurance, performers* fees, fodder, hire of
halls, all together added up to staggering figures. Why, argued Uncle
Heinrich, with such outgoings it only needed one rainy week to spell
financial ruin !

The next stage was that there had to be a giant big top, one like
Barnum and Bailey's in the United States of America! So Father
assured my mother. But 'Counsellor Renz,' to whom Father had just
supplied two newly arrived giraffes for his Queen ofSheba show, pooh-
poohed 'all that Yankee hooey/ That would last no time, said Renz.
'No harm in seeing,' insisted Father. And off he went across the duck-
pond, taking Uncle Heinrich with him, just to have a look. They duly
inspected the newfangled circus-inside-a-tent from every possible
angle and came to the conclusion that we could do with one like that
in Hamburg. Back in Hamburg, Father lost no time adapting all that
Mr. Bailey had shown him. He had no lack of groups of performing
animals or of ordinary menagerie animals. He could easily manage a
display of Indian peoples. In addition, there were tent and wagon
makers eager for orders. Thus eventually all that those two American
travellers had dreamed about on their way home was at last heralded
in Hamburg's leading daily, the Reform, of a day in April 1887 in the
following words : 'Tomorrow Carl Hagenbeck is to exhibit an Inter-
national Circus and Singhalese Caravan on the Heiligengeist Held.'

Tomorrow came, but, shortly before the gates were opened, our
first big top had been laid low by the gale.

Was Father beaten? By no means! Forty-eight hours later, Ham-
burg carpenters had bonded ship's masts to the tent-poles. Day and
night on his feet, at the end of tremendous efforts Father saw an
audience of three thousand Hamburg folk ranged in the first big tent
which bore our name. We children clapped like mad when the mo-
ment came for our brother Heinrich (in Hungarian costume) to ride
in immediately on the heels of the band, which to a man was mounted
on magnificently caparisoned elephants ! Our Jumbos were in charge
of Thompson, a famous American negro animal tamer of the day. Be-
hind the elephants came lions, tigers and panthers. More than forty

'NOT ONE OF THESE CARAVAN FOLK 1

horses trotted into the ring, which already at that date was lighted by
electricity, while at home we contented ourselves huddling round
the table over paraffin lamps !

We also had Argentinian girl riders. There were tight-rope walkers,
too, and above all, to delight my sisters and me, there were those
famous clowns, Olshanski and Tom Belling, already christened
'August' by Berliners when they had appeared in Renz's Circus. The
high point, however, was a pantomime entitled An Excursion to Wate-
gama in Ceylon, a show in which everybody joined in with the group
of Singhalese to form a really colourful display.

A wonderful memory, for five years old, you say? Yes, especially
since to this day I have kept the programme of that show which fifty
years later was to lead to a really amazing reunion of old friends in
Rio de Janeiro.

But I must not run ahead. For three weeks, my sisters and I, to-
gether with our friends, were of course daily visitors to the Heiligen-
geist Field. And when it was all over, my toy circus came in for great
service. Over and over again I built it up and took it down and also
rode, mounted on my rocking elephant, in and out among the chairs
till my poor mother put her foo down I was ruining her carpet or
her polished boards.

From Mother, indeed, 1 certainly did not get my natural disposition
for the folk of the road. Indeed, I must have imbibed it from my wet-
nurse, Crete. Crete, a native of that colourful Hamburg suburb St.
Pauli, was a most buxom young woman, whom Fritz Schipfman (who
travelled for us in Russia) had picked for wife when he saw her in a
pub performing as a snake-charmer. St. Pauli, south of the Heiligen-
geist Field, had then long been famous for its many bars and wine-
cellars, but during the cholera epidemic I remember my godfather,
Lorenz Kollisch, town veterinary surgeon (who then shared our house
with us), prescribed no beverage but boiled water ! To this day I re-
member the gruesome rumble of the corpse-wagon through the
Augusten Alley. Day in, day out there were new victims of that ter-
rible epidemic. It raged with particular severity in overcrowded St.
Pauli, striking people down in thousands. My father happened to be
away at the time, in Chicago, busy with preparations for his circus
and menagerie at the 1893 World Exhibition. Our zoo at home was
left in the charge of Joseph Menges. My mother's predominant care
was of course for us children, particularly ailing little 'Lorrie,' as I
was called in our Hamburg dialect, but thanks to Uncle Kollisch 's

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

good guidance, we were kept well and cheerful all through that
anxious time.

We were always a hospitable household. Rare was the day when
there was no visitor to join us round our enormous family dining-
table. Mother always cooked for at least a dozen hungry trenchermen,
while on the great feast days Father in patriarchal style liked to have
all the family gathered round him. One frequent visitor I remember
with particular vividness. His jolly Saxon dialect still rings in my ears.
This was the famous animal painter, Heinrich Leutemann. His pencil
had recorded for us the very birth of the Hagenbeck Animal Park in
the shape of a drawing of the big tubful of seals with which the enter-
prise began. It was a rare year in which we had no visit from the
veteran artist, who was always on the look-out for a novel sketch for
the Our Home magazine.* Sometimes he would bring one of his young
pupils with him. How well I remember one of these, who, one morn-
ing at breakfast, found himself faced with a table problem which had
him beaten. For Mother gave him a boiled egg, and the lad had actu-
ally never seen such a thing. What on earth was the proper way to
open it? The young man squinted across at his teacher, but dear old
Leutemann was deep in conversation with my father. So our visitor
essayed a few little taps on the shell, but far too cautiously. Then, as
this tip- tapping produced no result, he decided the object must be
treated like a walnut, so he took it between his hands, put these
between his knees, brought his legs together with a mighty clash.
With a swift squelch, up spurted the golden fountain of yolk, all over
my father's grey beard! Everybody at table laughed till the tears ran,
while Mother did her best to pacify Father and wipe the decoration
off him, after which he took it upon himself to show the embarrassed
young artist how people in Hamburg ate boiled eggs.

Oh, that carefree St. Pauli childhood! The trams in those days
rattled through the streets behind horses, and old housewives along
the route of the Wandsbek line cursed the 'puffing flat-iron* the first
steam railway in those parts because it made their lace curtains
smutty, f

Out to Altona ran the 'Chinese Railway* on which one could get
seasick. This line owed its nickname to its appearance its rolling-

* i.e. the magazine Daheim.

t A comical little engine with a tall, narrow chimney drew a sort of tram-car with
lower deck and a short upper deck reached by an external stairway either end.
Translator.

'NOT ONE OF THESE CARAVAN FOLK*

stock was yellow and covered with ornamentation which might have
belonged to a pagoda. Cooks still argued fiercely about the Customs
Union, which, bringing Hamburg into the general German system,
bumped up the price of salt at St. Pauli, believe it or not, from two to
eight pfennigs the kilogram.

In 189^, with the opening of the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal, the North
Sea and the Baltic were linked, and on that occasion many distin-
guished personalities, including the Prince Regent of Bavaria and
others of princely rank, visited our zoo. Frequently my father would
shout: 'Proppen, let the monkeys out, there's folk want to have a
peep/

Proppen 's real name was Zapf. He had been an old school friend of
my father's. When grandfather's smoked sturgeon sold well, it used
to be Proppen and Father who as boys together took the day's takings
round to the bank. Most of the cash was then of course good solid
coinage thalers, in fact, each worth about three marks of today's
currency. As the bag was fairly heavy, Father and Proppen used to
stick a stout pole through the two handles of the cash-bag and jointly
shoulder it, one behind the other, carrying the day's takings just as
the men of Canaan once carried their grapes. Such was the peaceful
way of life in St. Pauli in those days.

Proppen had three parts to his employment. He was the firm's
saddler, he was its upholsterer, and he was its 'maid-of-all-work' in
the zoo. He made the saddles for the camels, dromedaries and circus
elephants and he it was who patched together the canvas after the
great storm which destroyed our first big top. Otherwise, he was al-
ways busy on the never-ending task of repairing the padding of the
big closed transport boxes. From morning to night you heard poor
Proppen's name called upon to 'just fix this* and 'just fix that.' The
eight-hour day had not yet been invented, and Proppen had a quiver-
ful of ten to provide for. On the other hand, he had powerful financial
assistance from our snakes, for there was a chemical works which
paid good solid cash for the snow white excrement of our reptiles, a
curious substance, as hard as stone.

To Father's great mortification, however, Proppen had one serious
shortcoming: he loved ponies, by which I do not mean diminutive
horses, but in St. Pauli language certain flat little receptacles made
specially for workers to slip into their pockets. In those days a pony
of Kummel or 'Swiss,' which was a green variety of spirits, cost only
fifteen pfennigs, or about twopence, and as Proppen was by nature of

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

a cheerful temperament Father often found him at an establishment
known as Windy Corner, that is to say, snug in Jan Reimer J s little bar
three doors down the street, on the other side, instead of at his job 1

When a consignment of animals fell due, you would hear Father
shouting out of his office window: * Where's Proppen?'

* You'll have to dig him out,' would come the answering cry.

Then you would hear Father's indignant: 'Go and root the scoun-
drel out!'

And I would run round to the nearest bar to bring back Hagenbeck's
leading expert on lining horse-boxes.

Though my father was kindness itself, he was also a very unbending
man, and if he thought anybody was going counter to his instructions
there was the devil to pay. When a dreaded whistle shrilled from be-
tween his dazzlingly white teeth, it was: Look out! I remember when
he gave me two little guinea-pigs of my own to look after. Before many
days passed, going his round of inspection, he halted at my little cage
and whistled. A moment later I found myself uncomfortably placed
over his knee. Yet the evening before I had given my guinea-pigs a
lavish supply of new bedding and food. During the night, however,
they had eaten up all they had, and now, guinea-pig fashion, were
piping at the top of their voices, so Father got the idea that they were
hungry. But anything I could say might just as well have been spoken
into the wind. However, after that little misunderstanding, he never
took my trousers down again.

It was, however, never easy for us children to satisfy the old boy
completely. He himself had had a hard upbringing, a childhood of
hard work, and hence he had notions about such matters which in our
comfortably off, middle-class circumstances seemed a little Spartan.
On the other hand, though for both Heinrich and me this meant much
work in the zoo, we never really considered looking after the animals
hard work. Indeed, it was rather a pleasant and entertaining sort of
occupation.

Besides, behind Father's back there was always Mother to temper
the punishments he ordered such as on the occasion when a certain
scamp named 'Lorrie' let loose a box of black-beetles in class, or on
another occasion, when we were supposed to take specimens for
Nature study, he introduced a monkey which he had secretly taken off
its chain, thereby not merely hindering studies but in the ensuing
chase after the interrupter turning upside-down the whole of the St.
Pauli school which I attended.

'NOT ONE OF THESE CARAVAN FOLK

There is one thing for which I am today most grateful to my father,
and that is for realising at an early date the advantages of schoolboy
exchanges. He took the initiative by bringing the sons of English busi-
ness friends into the family. I recall how attractive we found their
English clothes their stiff bowlers, which we in German called
'melons,' and their peculiar short- tailed jackets, which we rather dis-
respectfully called 'bum-freezers.' My giggling sisters used to vie
with one another just to cross the street with Charly Judge or Reuben
Carstang in those revealing garments. (Today, Reuben is my oldest
and best friend, and his name will crop up again and again in the course
of these reminiscences.)

My father was a great lover of children, and whenever he felt he
had time he would have our coachman Jochen harness the big touring
brake, and off he would go with two dozen nephews, nieces and chil-
dren of the neighbours, out of town to Alterskrug, where we went
fishing, or Eppendorf Moor, where there were glorious hunts for
blindworms, lizards and frogs. After this we would turn in at a coun-
try inn to be treated by my father to generous hunks of bread-and-
butter, with lemonade or milk.

Coachman Jochen had a wonderfully glowing nose, for he too was
a passionage worshipper of Kiimmel and porter, of which drinks he
would so regularly partake at every bar round Horsemarket Square*
that his horse used to pull up at the proper places without being told.
There was one occasion when the faithful nags were wiser than their

driver, for, on their way home, they pulled up immediately under
my father's window dear Jochen was stretched out full length on
the driving seat, sleeping off his booze. Pursued by appropriate ex-
pletives, he was sacked on the spot; later, however, towards Christ-
mas, to be slyly reinstated, for nobody could do Father Christmas as
well as could Jochen, his enormous red nose coming in just right.

Christmas was a time which was always heralded by tremendous
preparations in kitchen, cellar and parlour. Whole casefuls of presents
had to be got in tubs of fruit, pounds and pounds of smoked sausage
of all sorts and tobacco and cigars were all trundled in, and innumer-
able parcels then made up for our coachman and the maids on Christ-
mas Eve to take round to all our employees and needy folk we knew
in St. Pauli.

Christmas was the great time for recitations and other perform-
ances, and we children were always anxious to have Father's praise,

* i.e. the Pferdemarkt. Translator.

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

On one occasion, I remember, there was a very special item in the
field of music: my brother Heinrich and my sister Maria were to play
a piano duet. When the final chord rang out and, full of pride, their
teacher rose to take her bow, somewhere behind a hoarse voice sud-
denly broke the festive silence and for a moment brought a flow of
tears to her eyes by the terrible words: 'You are crazy, my child!'
It was our parrot 1

There was always so much food and drink left over from the family
Christmas that at last the time came when my mother would say, 'Ask
the office staff to step in ! ' and then our cook and all the maids mixed
with the gentlemen of the cash register and copying press and danced
till the floorboards groaned. Unless my memory fails me sadly, girls
in service at the Hagenbecks' all made good matches. Indeed, some of
them are to this day to be found scattered around the Stcllingen Zoo
district, dignified housewives and business men's spouses.

Whenever my father came home from one of his many journeys
abroad, he always brought Mother a surprise. I recall clearly how
once, returning from a profitable trip to Egypt, he staggered into the
room and groaned: 'I can't think what's the matter, I feel so tight
here.' Hand pressed tightly to chest, he sank exhausted into a chair.
In great alarm my poor mother rushed to unbutton his frock-coat.
When she did so, a small parcel dropped into her hand. It was a little
gold dromedary, with saddle-bags full of pearls. Now it was Mother's
turn to flop into a chair, completely taken aback by that costly little
memento from the land of the Pharaohs.

In 1 894, when my brother Heinrich was already in the business, my
sisters and I were still going to school, and with my cousin Paul
Mehrmann, later our chief clerk, I spent the summer holidays with
my Uncle Peter, out at Tellingstedt, where he ran both a pottery
business and a pig-food business. As pet I took with me a young male
baboon, which Uncle Peter taught all sorts of tricks and antics, and
what outrageous things he did not think up we young ones did. Soon
enough that monkey knew how to pull up swedes. He also rode the
pigs and piglets all round, and he got up to so much mischief that he
was soon notorious all round the district. Indeed, Wilhelm Busch's
delightful poem about 'Phipps the Monkey* fits the case to a T, for my

baboon too, , ,

. . . the worse the antics cited,

The more the little pet delighted. '
What is more, my monkey also ended true to his literary counter-

'NOT ONE OF THESE CARAVAN FOLK*

part, by buckshot well aimed by Uncle Peter for one day, having
grown older, Joko lunged out at Uncle and tore his arm so badly that
for some time after he could not throw pots on his wheel.

The day of arrival in Hamburg of any new contingent of animals
or, even more, of a new party of exotic natives was invariably a
great event for us children, and school work ceased abruptly. Since
1875 the stream of men and women of distant lands, begun in that
year with a party of Lapps, never ceased. Most vividly do I recall the
Somalis, under their chief, Hersy Egeh, whom Joseph Menges brought
from Abyssinia in 189$. When they arrived, laundry baskets full of
bread were brought in and boilerfuls of tea were made. It was a lovely
sight to see our Hamburg cook and the Somali mammas busy with the
visitors over various coffee-brown children.

Every day brought fresh excitements. For instance, there was the
night when I had to hold lighted candles for our lion-tamer, August
Molker, when he was acting midwife to one of his tigresses. Then
there was the day when a new-born zebra made its first gawky attempts
to walk. One day there would be tortoises to unpack, another a baby
elephant to handle ! It is perhaps not astonishing that all my memories
of childhood now come to me against a diffused zoological background.
After all, I first saw daylight in a menagerie and I grew up from infancy
surrounded by exotic creatures.

I can still hear our special harpist tinkling away a rhinoceros, who
plucked away at the same little tune, day in, day out, with his power-
ful nose-horn, on the iron bars of his cage, ping pang pong pung one
way, then pung pong pang ping the other.

In those long ago days before the introduction of quarantine regu-
lations and strict freight charges for live mementoes from oversea,
the port of Hamburg was the Tom Tiddler's ground of pet dealers,
who used to be able to get all manner of monkeys, parrots, snakes and
other exotic creatures there for a mere song. They kept in close touch
with shipping schedules and knew what treasures were to be expected
off every sailing ship or steamer which berthed in the Hamburg docks.
After making their purchases, they generally went straight to my
father to offer their goods, though some preferred to try to find a
customer themselves.

I have a vivid memory of three of those port dealers in particular.
These were 'Gutschmidt, whose carroty hair earned him the nick-
name of the Red Setter, Breitweiser, with the fine nickname of

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

Snakenabber, and Rath, whom his rivals called the Pirate because he
got the better of them.

In the days when Breitweiser, the Pirate and the Red Setter were
competing in Hamburg docks, my father once sent me to the house of
a seaman who was said to have a hyena for sale. I did not find the man
at home. His buxom wife was up to the elbows in the wash-tub, and
the kitchen was dark with smoke and steam.

'And how much do you want for the hyena?' I asked.

'Pooh, how should I know?' said she. 'My husband never named a
price for the thing.'

I offered sixty marks, and a moment later stuffed the striped animal
into a sack and set off home, to open the bag again in Father's office
and await with great pride what he would have to say about my
purchase.

'Here, what's that you've got there?'

'The little hyena, Father.'

'You call that a hyena?' he cried, and his eyes fastened fiercely on
me over his spectacle rims. 'You numskull, that is an earth-wolf.
What did you pay for it?'

'Sixty marks.'

'Lad,' said he, 'that's far too little. You go straight back and give
the woman another hundred ! '

That was Father all over, and I had no other course but to do as 1
was told.

Breitweiser 's missus was an old friend of my wet-nurse's and had
also done stage business with snakes, which, as his nickname indicated,
her husband also knew well. Originally, indeed, Breitweiser had been
a showman himself, after which he had travelled as an animal keeper
under Richard Sawade, one of the most famous animal trainers of the
age. Breitweiser had travelled abroad a great deal, largely in the Bal-
kans and in Russia. One evening I had to go round to his home to fetch
him out on an urgent errand. A Russian had telegraphed an offer, a
mixed consignment of polar bears, reindeer, arctic seals and birds,
the goods to be taken over at once at Nizhni-Novgorod! Russian-
speaking Breitweiser was the very man for the job. He arrived in
Nizhni on time, and as reward the man who built the Trans-Siberian
Railway gave him a gold watch. For this millionaire was incidentally
the organiser of an industrial exhibition in Nizhni-Novgorod,* which

* Nizhni (or Lower)-Novgorod, now Gorki, the centre of an important annual trading
fair lasting many weeks, attended by merchants from all over the world. Translator.

'NOT ONE OF THESE CARAVAN FOLK 1

among other attractions had included a show of the wild animals of
the Russian Empire. For this the Russians had sent special expeditions
to the most remote corners of their huge empire to get animals, but
whereas some had turned up empty-handed, others arrived with
animals much too late, which had resulted in the desperate telegraphic
call to Hamburg, the idea being to unload them on Carl Hagenbeck !
' At the Nizhni exhibition, Breitweiser found nine huge stags, so-
called marals,* which a Russian was offering to sell. In the end,
Breitweiser concluded an agreement by which this Russian was to
supply my father who agreed by telegram with no fewer than twenty-
seven marals. Unfortunately, the creatures were never supplied, so
Breitweiser went to Siberia himself. Here, in the Altai Mountains, he
came to a new arrangement with a Kirghiz named Essim Khan, and
himself joined in the hunt ; for it was now mid-winter, and the deep
snows, which made his return journey difficult, were just what was
wanted to capture marals. The procedure was simple. The stags were
cornered in six-foot-deep snow, when it was easy to capture and
corral them, till they could be dispatched by train.

But now that the initial Russian supplier saw that Breitweiser was
getting on well enough without him, he immediately produced the
twenty-seven marals originally agreed on, so our man now found
himself with no fewer than sixty-two of these animals to bring back to
Hamburg, together with seven argalis, nine stcinbocks and a Siberian
tiger which had also fallen into his hands. The largest of the stags was
as tall as a high-standing horse and had ninetecn-point antlers. Breit-
weiser told me that at Omsk he saw a specimen with no less than
twenty-nine points, but this he was unable to buy.

For all these giant stags there was a ready market among the princes
and big hunting landowners of Germany, Austria-Hungary and
Britain, who bought them to improve the blood of the local stock.
Subsequently, Father could never get a sufficient number of them to
satisfy all the demands of the hunting gentry.

Early in the nineties Fridtjof Nansen's daring thrust towards the
North Pole directed world attention to arctic regions. The names of
Nansen and his famous ship, the Fram, or 'Forwards' (now to be seen
in the Oslo Museum) were on all lips. A year after the safe return of
the Fram, Salomon AndreVs polar expedition in a balloon the first
polar flight came to its tragic end, and the whole world talked of
that daring attempt. My father, who had already succeeded in

* The Russian name for a species of deer, Cervus claprus. Translator.

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

showing Eskimos, Tierra del Fuegans, Australian aborigines, Indians
and Kalmyks in his shows of 'strange peoples of the world/ now
exploited the sudden burst of enthusiasm for the cold caps at the two
poles, and set up a tremendous Polar Panorama on the Heiligengeist
Field.

Panoramas, I should explain, were then a most popular form of
show for the masses, whose thirst for spectacle had not yet been jaded
by the cinema. Mammoth backcloths were erected, supported by
three-dimensional erections in the foreground, to give a panoramic
picture of great fires, of battlefields, or of shipwrecks. The panorama
at the Dammtor* showed the Storming of St. Privet, that at the Mil-
lerntor* the Great Fire of Hamburg in huge lifelike pictures. But a polar
landscape in natural size, complete with polar bears, seals, guillemots,
and other birds gulls and cormorants was something that Hamburg
had never seen.

'This idea has been realised in striking manner by the famous
animal trainer Carl Hagenbeck. The triumph of the scenic artist has
been combined with three-dimensional representation, to create a
most exciting open-air polar landscape, and for the first time of its
kind, this panorama has been enriched with live animals moving
about in complete freedom,' stated the Illustrated Times] corres-
pondent in 1897, with a full-page photograph of the scene.

I can still picture those mountains of imitation ice and hear the
roaring of the bears, the hoarse barking of the seals and the rasping
cries of the arctic seabirds.

In the evening that most vivid polar picture was illuminated, with
the frozen-up Pram in the background, and the folk of Hamburg
flocked in such numbers to see the panorama (which occupied a space
of about ten thousand square feet) that Cousin Paul and I often had to
race round to our nearby 'Zoo* office for a fresh supply of tickets.

This North Pole show, which also went with great success to the
Berlin Industrial Exhibition, and later under the title of La Vie au
Pole Nord to Paris, was the prototype of the later stationary Arctic
Panorama which we built at Stellingen. By then my father had had this
show patented at Germany's Imperial Patents Office. He had tried it
out thoroughly, and improved on it, so that today, executed by master
hands, it counts as one of the sights of Stellingen.

All the tremendous life and activity of our zoo on the Neuer

* Two of Hamburg's city gates. Translator.
t i.e. the Illustrierte Zeitung. Translator.

'NOT ONE OF THESE CARAVAN FOLK'

Pferdemarkt ground, with its arrival of exotic peoples, its coming and
going of animals and the gripping liveliness of its training hall, were
far too engaging for a young lad who needed still to complete his
school studies. To tell the truth, I only just scraped through my one-
year service exam.* But subjects in which I was not particularly bril-
liant were balanced by knowledge of biology and foreign languages,
for my English boyhood friends Charly and Reuben had given me an
excellent pronunciation in that language.

I was eventually able to put my school-leaving certificate on my
father's desk at the very moment of his arrival back from a trip to
London. As reward I was sent on an errand to Paris. Thence, combin-
ing business with pleasure I was to bring back a hippopotamus, some
zebras, some antelopes and some wild sheep which Father had just
purchased. With me went Karl Ross, at the time one of our animal
trainers. An Alsatian, Ross spoke fluent French. Father warned us to
take particular care of the hippo. It had already been re-sold to an
American purchaser.

I found the little creature, about eight and a half feet long, in an
outdoor pool at the Jardin des Plantes, the second oldest zoo in
Europe, for Vienna's Schonbrunn preceded it. Although it had been a
mild winter that year, the poor animal was unused to such compara-
tively low temperatures as Paris offered. Hippo was badly chapped,
with cracks in her skin, into which one could easily stick one's finger.
To protect those raw places and help heal them, Father had enjoined
me to keep her well massaged with vaseline. But that was easier said
than done ! The French had made the cases she and the other animals
were to travel in rather a tight fit, and we had only just settled our-
selves down in the straw of the railway box- wagon in which we were
travelling when a zebra started the fun and began to go mad in his
box.

I could see that the trouble was definitely the smallness of the box
in which the poor creature was confined. Fortunately I had with me
one of those knives which include a saw blade, and, taking it in turns,
Karl Ross and I sawed away, till we had made a hole big enough for the
zebra to have its air. The animal was already streaming with sweat,
but was soon able to stand up again. Now we had to turn to our other

* An examination in Germany, prior to 1919, which allowed those who passed it to
Si.Tve only one year's military service. Translator.

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

responsibility and pomade our corpulent hippo lady with vaseline.
This we contrived to do with a couple of sponges tied on a stick, and
with these we massaged her back as far as we could. She lay quietly,
but as this made it rather difficult to get at the vast rotundities of her
bottom, we thought we would cautiously open the sliding door at the
back.

This was not a very happy thought. We had no sooner raised that
shutter than the terrified hippo made one great backwards heave,
and before we had had time clearly to sum up the situation, there were
two zoological cosmetic experts perched high right up against the
roof of that box-wagon, on a pile of packing cases, with menacing
open jaws reaching up towards them.

So there we were ! Somewhere behind us lay Paris. In front, was
an enormous salad bowl of a mouth. And no handy communication
cord within reach ! The colossus of the river now got her front hooves
up on the lower stage of our piled boxes and stared menacingly at us,
a little closer still, and flapping her ears. Not a little alarmed, we drew
back as far as we could, our heads bumping against the roof.

'We can't stay up here all the way to Hamburg! 1 I heard my com-
panion shout above the din of the goods train, while for a change our
feminine travelling companion proceeded to trample our provision
basket to pulp. Fortunately, I now found that I was just able to reach
one of the planks which we had torn off the zebra's box, and with this
I fetched the lady such a resounding crack on her rather spatulate nose
that she actually blinked in surprise, swung round, and took swift
refuge in her box, where with hoarse breath she flopped on to her
belly. With the agility of monkeys, we tumbled down again, dropped
the door into position, and snatched up the brandy flask, which for-
tunately the monster had not touched. The situation had changed.
Our worries were all over. We now had one female hippopotamus
about which we did not care very much, and, seeing her warmly
tucked in her straw, we allowed her to travel the rest of the way to
Hamburg unsalved.

To round this story off, I must leap forty years. In the zoo at Cin-
cinnati in the State of Ohio the good hippo grew to a colossal size and
acquired the convenient name of Zeekoe. Then, passing on, she was
sold to the great Chicago Field Museum. And the day came when
Simons, the director of this, proudly showed me a tremendous
African diorama in which what did I see but my enormous hippo once
again gaping at me with menacing jaws, only this time stuffed.

'NOT ONE OF THESE CARAVAN FOLK 1

'That,' said he, 'is Zeekoe, and it's the largest hippo I ever saw,'
and he pointed to my gentle travelling partner.

'Yes, and I may tell you that she once gave me the largest fright I
ever had in my life,' was my response, and of course I told the story.
That was manna to the pressman in attendance on us. He blew up the
story well, and for some time to come the rise in attendance at that
museum was remarkable !

In 1 899 I was to find how true was the German saying 'Lehrjahre sind
keine Henenjahre 'the years of learning are no gay time.' For,
leaving school, I was articled to a Hamburg importer who dealt in
pork, lard and oils. If ever there was a dull job, that was it! And all
the time that I was carrying out my greasy little duties the most bizarre
kaleidoscope of strange animals and strange peoples was spinning
round our ground in the Neuer Pferdemarkt field. I cannot tell you
how I leapt for joy when, after thirty months and one week of that,
Father freed me from the company of dead swine. There was to be a
World Exhibition at Buffalo in North America, and I was to accom-
pany him there !

There at last was the jetty at Hoboken, and there, bobbing up and
down, was the bowler of Doc Colvin, our representative at the time
in New York. Good homely Hamburg dialect billowed across the
narrowing gap of water to us for show folk were at that time largely
Hamburg folk, who over in America spoke a delightful hotchpotch of
their own Low German and English. After a meal, Doc Colvin got
down to the principal business, the new price list for the Siberian
animals which had only just arrived at Stellingen, and the market for
those diminutive wild horses, the small primitive Siberian ponies,*
was discussed. Father had been the first to import these into Germany.

Our travellers, Grieger and Wache, had foot-slogged about eighteen
hundred miles from Inner Mongolia to the nearest Russian railway
station, and we had no fewer than twenty-eight specimens of those rare
primitive horses, or rather of foals of the species, which had travelled
all this long way with their foster-mothers.

Now, in America, I really was to be astonished, for I found that my
dear old father knew all the North American zoos and their managers
inside out ! At once we set out on a round tour, visiting all the more
important menageries and road circuses of the New World, a good
schooling, of which all possible use was made. It was most exciting
whenever Father came on an elephant or a chimpanzee which had first

* Equus Przewalski. Translator.

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

learned its tricks in 1 890 under him in our Neuer Pferdemarkt circus,
and more often than not the delight was mutual.

But it was in the end not the Buffalo World Exhibition but Barnum
and Bailey's impressive show which made the greatest impression on
me. Now that Phineas T. Barnum was dead, it was James H. Bailey
who managed what was then the biggest such concern in the world.
Bailey was of medium height and slender build, invariably dressed in
a long, old-fashioned frock-coat, with a hat on his head such as I have
seen on no other. It was a cross between a bowler and a topper, made
for him alone. Mr. Bailey, long since a dollar multi-millionaire, took
us out with him to see his huge winter residence at Bridgeport, in
Connecticut, and finally insisted on our staying to lunch.

I was delighted, and licked my lips in anticipation, for all my life I
have loved a good table. Father accepted the invitation, I think with
expectation equal to my own. Thereupon without more ado our host
took us to the station buffet in the Bridgeport waiting-room and
ordered himself a glass of milk and a slice of apple tart. And what
would we have? We modestly elected to take the same as Mr. Bailey.
From then on, whenever I think of an American millionaire lunching,
I do not see what most people do !

But what our host later served us up as a showmanship meal in his
gigantic tent, which would seat six thousand persons, with its three
rings and two stages, was as grandiloquent as his lunch was poor. It
was all-over American. If one did not like what was going on in one
ring, one looked at another, and if that did not suit one could just
look up at the trapeze and the tight-rope folk high above. However,
what I think interested me most were the technicalities of organisation
of the high-speed transport of so big a concern. Father too had once
had a circus on the road, but after much nervous fret he had sold this
round about 1889. Even now he repeated what he had so often im-
pressed on me : 'No, my lad, you are not going to be one of those
caravan folk.' But in life, as the reader will see for himself, I was
destined to pay little heed to this well-intentioned injunction.

Animals which in Nature never meet : a performing group bringing
together polar bears, lions and brown_ bears

Left: Black Eagle, Sioux Chief, in full war paint

Right: Somali Prince Hersy Egeh, whose son attended our
Stellingen primary school

THE INDIAN'S WEALTH THE ELEPHANT ,

WE GOT back to Hamburg on October 3rd, just in time for my
mother's birthday. The very same day I became a member of Father's
firm, in which my brother Heinrich had for years been the right hand.
It was to be my job to keep the 'in* and 'out* ledgers in copperplate
handwriting.* But when, freshly equipped as I was with all manner of
business knowledge, I ran through the firm's books I soon established
that Father had often paid more tax than he need. I pointed this out to
him. And that was as far as I got. With fierce eyes he conned me over
the top of his spectacles. 'Lorrie,' he said sternly, 'bear in mind that
the country must have taxes; without revenue it cannot go on! 1

Short trips to neighbouring European countries now became so
frequent a necessity that today I simply could not say either how often,
or exactly when, I visited London, Paris, Antwerp, Budapest or
Copenhagen. My clearest memory, I think, is of the occasion when I
first accompanied Father to Woburn Abbey in England, where the
Duke of Bedford showed us his wonderful private zoo. What a lovely
sight that was! Zebra, elk, all sorts of antelope, the rarest of
pheasants, a large herd of fallow deer, roe deer, and wild birds from
all parts of the world wandered at liberty over that well-cared-for
English landscape. At Woburn Abbey, the Duke could well be proud
of having large herds of bison, yaks, ostriches and even giraffes. Alas,
though, that is all a picture of the past, for during the first world war
many of the animals were slaughtered and the meat distributed to the
hungry local population. Among the victims were elands weighing
more than a ton. Fortunately, the famous P&re David deer were kept,
and perhaps for the benefit of those of my readers who have not been
so interested in questions of zoology as I have, I may tell their fascina-
ting story.

Sze pu-shiang, the Chinese called these animals of the great swamps.
The meaning of the name is curious : none of four I It records the curious

* In those days a special value was attached to that calligraphic aspect of the books.
When I go through my office today and see the colourful card indexes and electric
comptometers, it is not without emotion that I think back at our meritorious ancient
day book, which recognised only money received and money paid out.

3 AML

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

fact that these deer have cloven hooves like reindeer, tails like
donkeys, the gait of cattle, and the bent-back antlers of the stag. They
were first discovered by the Jesuit Father David, a great connoisseur
of wild animal life. But not at large they were inside the carefully
guarded walls of the secret Imperial Palace of Peking. In due course,
however, the French Ambassador succeeded in sending to France
some specimens of these animals almost extinct in wild life. The first
of them reached Paris in 1866, to be officially named, in honour of
the man who discovered them, the Pere David deer.

Later, during the Boxer uprising, it proved impossible to protect
the walls of the so-called Forbidden City against the soldiery, and
these Milu stags, as they were also called, found their way into the
cooking pots of the troops encamped there. Later there took place
something nobody had anticipated: from a cow belonging to the
Duke of Bedford and a stag bred by ourselves, a fine European herd of
them was ultimately reared, one specimen of which was being shown
in our Stellingen Animal Park before the first world war.

Today these Pere David deer have become expensive zoological
rarities, which may puzzle the layman who is ignorant of the facts of
their origin. When I last visited Woburn Abbey (in 19^1), I counted
some two hundred and fifty specimens, and in 19^0 the first calf of
this species, which once upon a time was protected from alien eyes in
Peking by Tatar imperial guards, was calved in the New World, in the
Bronx Park in New York.

Soon after my visit to Woburn I took a transport of animals by sea
from Liibeck to what was then Imperial Russia. The animals were for
the zoos of Petersburg today Leningrad and Moscow. In that vast
empire there were at the time only four rather small zoos, apart from
the huge animal preserve known as Askania-Nova in the Crimea,
which belonged to the landowner Friedrich Faltz-Fein, and there were
to be seen examples of Przewalski's horse, zebras and other animals of
the steppes living in comparative freedom. In Moscow I was taken by
an elderly and white-haired inspector to see two huge bull elephants
which had lived there a good fifty years. He told me that they had
been the present of an Indian prince to the Tsar, and had made the
long journey from India to Moscow on foot, escorted by a squadron
of Cossack cavalry.

I should now explain that in the elephant the Indians honour the
beast ridden by their supreme deities. Sanskrit, the ancient Indian
language of scholars, contains hundreds of honorific terms for this,

THE INDIAN'S WEALTH THE ELEPHAN"

the most powerful animal of our age. In particular, the light-skinned,
so-called 'white elephants' enjoy the greatest honour in India as
temple beasts. Thus those two Moscow bull elephants were not
merely a zoological enrichment of the menagerie of a Tsar, but, more
profoundly, a diplomatic gesture of friendship for the man *vho was
then the 'ruler of all the Russias.'

It has now been established that the first Indian elephant to reach
present-day Germany came in similar fashion. It was the elephant
known as Abulabas, foot-slogging coronation present of Caliph Harun
al-Rashid of Baghdad to the Emperor Charlemagne. Abulabas trod
every inch of the way from India to the royal city of Aachen, reaching
that town on June 2oth, 80 2, a year and a half after the actual corona-
tion, and exciting tremendous interest.

This Indian custom has been revived in recent times. In 1949,
Pandit Nehru sent an elephant named Indira as a 'messenger of good-
will' from New Delhi to Tokyo. The letter accompanying it ran :

'Dear Children,

'I am very glad to be sending you one of our elephants, as you
wished. It is a good elephant, very well brought up, and, so I am
told, endowed with all the good virtues. Please do not treat it as a
present from me, but as one from the children of India to the
children of Japan.

'Children resemble each other in many ways everywhere in the
world. It is only when you begin to grow up that you get different
opinions. Unhappily, when that happens, you often come into
conflict.

'We must put an end to these clashes between grown-ups. It is
my hope that, when they are older, the children of India and Japan
will not serve only their own countries, but also the cause of peace
and co-operation in the whole of Asia and the world. So you must
see in this elephant called Indira a messenger of the love and good-
will of the children of India.

'Elephants are noble animals, and are much beloved in India.
They set India a very good example. They are brave, patient, strong
and yet gentle. I hope that we shall all come to be like that.'

This, word for word, was the message of the Indian Prime Minister.
Three years later, the elephant Shanti reached the Berlin Zoo on a
similar mission. But that young Madame Elephant was spared the
exertions of her predecessor, Abulabas. The firm of Carl Hagenbeck

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

bought her a ship's passage, and also made sure that she got on the
right train at Hamburg.

For years my father made vain efforts to secure a superficially large
ground-site in Hamburg itself. The Neuer Pferdemarkt animal park
had become too small for the steadily augmenting traffic in large
animals. At the same time, Father had for years had in a drawer of his
desk plans for a completely new style free zoo. He was in fact doing all
he could to realise that project. Suddenly, his luck turned, and on
what was then Prussian territory, in the parish of Stellingen, just out-
side the city gates of Hamburg, he acquired a suitable property. Now
his coach was always driving out of town, to direct the first steps in the
necessary work on the new site.

Soon after this we ourselves moved out, taking up residence in the
old country-style house which stood on our new estate, and in due
course a large part of our menagerie was also moved out. All round us
we now saw armies of navvies, landscape gardeners and architects all
busy to realise what since 1 896 had been slumbering among Father's
private papers as Imperial Patent No. 91,492, a document furnished
with all the necessary seals. Put succinctly, what Father wanted to do
was to keep all his animals in natural surroundings, with no cages at
all, in a well-ordered park.

His desires were translated into artistic reality by a Swiss sculptor
who became a friend of the family. This was Urs Eggenschwyler, who
got busy with a team of Hamburg stonemasons and carpenters. He was
a giant of a man, with the strength of a bear. He wore an unkempt full
beard and was at the same time artist, animal lover and a passionate
handicraftsman, possessed with his ideas. In the sandpits and stone
quarries of the district he loved demonstrating to the men how rock
formations lay in strata. But in addition to these qualities, he had real
Swiss stubbornness, with the result that he was often at loggerheads
with my father, who had the same quality, derived in his case from
Hanseatic ancestry. But by dint of stubborn debating, the two always
came to agree in the end, and after their tiffs would heap presents on
one another !

In these years the man on whom my father relied most was un-
questionably my brother Heinrich. In any case, on October ist, 1902,
I had to go up as so-called 'volunteer* for one year's military service,
and in the Altona barrack square of the Count Bose Infantry Regiment

THE INDIAN'S WEALTH THE ELEPHANT

No. 31, to the greater glory of Prussia, studied the art of putting my
right hand smartly to the peak of my cap. That lasted ten weeks, after
which the M.O. flung me out because of a middle ear inflammation,
so that, without a hint of fame, I found myself all at once transferred
to the non-combatant reserve. As in the eyes of 'the boss* I was still
an enthusiastic animal man, I was able to hang up my uniform without
a trace of regret and in compensation with great pleasure packed pith
helmet, Kodak and khaki drill kit and went on my first trip to India,
to bring back a consignment of elephants.

It is lovely today to look back on that journey, the most carefree I
ever made. I went to India, of course, by sea. The responsibility for all
arrangements still rested on the shoulders of our veteran, experienced
Indian representative Jiirgen Johannsen. Among our fellow passengers
on the s.s. Hamburg were a number of officers' families of the colony
which Germany then still possessed at Tsingtao,* and I had a glorious
field for flirtation with a number of charming daughters without having
to beg Papa's permission first. There were magnificent fancy-dress
parties, games of all sorts and evenings given up to dancing, and
Father had not been at all mean about expenses. He had indeed made
only one stipulation that I was to record every single penny I spent.
That was fundamental in his eyes. A man who, like himself, had had
to earn every extra penny in his own young days (even by such means
as straightening out old nails) was certainly going to train his own sons
in being thrifty, even though he was now well off.

One party on board I remember with special vividness. In considera-
tion of a good tip, one of the stewards lent me his uniform, and I had
a fine game with it. First, I waited on the captain's table, and did it
with great style, till I held an hors-d'oeuvre dish so high that he could
not reach it. Then he had something quite strong to say about my
clumsiness and, glaring up at me, noticed what a sea-change had
come to his steward !

That was my initial rehearsal. For my object was to teach certain
snobbish young ladies a lesson, and I was merely trying out my dis-
guise on the captain. On board we had one family whose daughters
bore themselves with the utmost arrogance. I had noticed that with
their wine these young ladies regularly drank a bottle of mineral
water, and that put a very naughty idea into my head. With serious
mien, I took the orders for drinks. And when they gave their

* Tsingtao leased to Germany with Kiaochow in 1 898, restored to China in 1922.
Translator.

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

standardised order, I brought them a little concoction I had specially
prepared. Without a trace of suspicion they mixed the contents of the
bottle as usual with their red wine, and drank. Results were not long
coming. I think they had rather an uneasy evening. If either of them
should ever read these lines, will she, even at this late hour, accept my
apologies for the brusqueness of the lesson ?

As ship's factor, animal trainer and plantation owner, Uncle John
a half-brother of my father's had made good in Colombo. Now, every
evening we sat on the veranda of his bungalow, 'The Lawn/ chatting
about Hamburg, while tens of thousands of fireflies flitted through the
warm air, and my glance kept stealing behind the house to the large
swimming-pool, framed in a fairy-tale jungle setting. The sounds of
the tropical night and the moon shining from behind the exotic out-
line of the palm trees together combined in a loveliness I had never
known. While Johannsen went on to Calcutta in the Hamburg, Uncle
John showed me Ceylon.

My first railway trip to Kandy was something to remember. While
the train climbed the hairpin bends of the track higher and higher
into the mountains, dazzling flashes of summer lightning lit up the
astonishing landscape beneath us. And, the moment we arrived at
Kandy, we were the centre of a great crowd of Singhalese, whom
years before Uncle John had engaged for one of our great shows. These
native folk were delighted to see us again, and I never appeared in the
streets of Kandy without being followed by twenty or thirty of them,
jabbering and gesticulating delightedly, making of me a sort of one-
man 'exotic panorama 1 for friends, neighbours and the Ceylonese
morld generally. They were most insistent about one thing: they
wanted me to take them on another trip to Germany.

From the veranda of our hotel we had a view over the magnifi-
cently situated Lake Kandy, on the shores of which, among other
things, I had an opportunity of observing that fascinating fish, the
climbing perch. The temple in which one of the teeth of Buddha is
preserved made a tremendous impression on me. The outside walls
are ornate with giant representations of great simplicity, but very
convincing for the natives. They depict the tortures which after death
sinners undergo in expiation of their misdeeds on earth.

Our next stop was Calcutta. Johannsen was to await me there. But
when I arrived I could see no Johannsen in the throngs on the quay-
side. I was pressing forward into the babel of incomprehensible sounds,
completely lost, when suddenly a black-bearded Indian wriggled

THE INDIAN'S WEALTH THE ELEPHAN^

through the crowd like a weasel, his blue eyes fastened on me. Why,
but it was Kudratl Kudrat was our elephant transporter, who had
travelled to Hamburg with many a load of animals for us, and knew
me well. He pressed into my hand a letter from Johannsen, from
which I learned that that worthy had gone to the elephant market at
Sonpur. So Kudrat and I decided to go straight to the railway station.
Reaching Palezaghat, I heard the cry: 'Ail change, 1 for to reach the
railway station we had to cross the river.

We crossed the Ganges in a diminutive river steamer. Near the
paddle-wheels I noticed natives with long bamboo poles, which they
were poking into the water. When I went across to see what this was
all about, to my horror I saw that they were poking human corpses out
of the way of the steamer's paddle-wheels. The swollen bodies were
those of people who had died and been thrown into the holy river
somewhere upstream, a form of burial, for the great stream would
take them, as Indian beliefs demanded, down to Nirvana.

At the terminal railway station, Digha-Ghat, my faithful guide
Kudrat and I were again met by another Indian, who had a two-
wheeled cart, and in this I was taken to Sonpur, where Johannsen and
I found ourselves the only Europeans among many thousands of
natives. There was a religious festival going on, all somehow con-
nected with the great elephant fair. We bought ourselves a couple of
blankets and some household requirements for our tent. Johannsen
was in a rather morose mood, as he was suffering from stomach cramps,
so I soon decided to take charge of the cooking myself.

Throughout the night the gongs of the priests rang out. They were,
so far, like wonderful bells. But when the next night came and they
still did not cease, I did not find either their sound or the singsong
chanting of the priests at all so romantic. Indeed, I now felt very
sorry for Johannsen, who regularly cursed and complained in his
broad dialect that before all this was over the 'divvel' would have the
best of us, and no 'guid Chreestian' could possibly sleep with that
unholy din going on.

There were soon literally hundreds of elephants up for sale. They
were mainly tame animals, merely tethered by one fore and one hind
leg between a couple of trees, but there were those which were still
not broken in, and these were firmly lashed to really powerful trees
with cables as thick as a man's arm. Day after day fresh herds of ten to
fifteen elephants each came in. They all swam to the fairground across
the Ganges, together with their mahouts. The young animals as far as

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

possible contrived to cling to their mothers' backs. Many times I saw
the mothers holding the babies with their trunks or pushing them on
in front of themselves.

One day, crossing the river, a large elephant and its mahout were
torn off their feet by the powerful current and swept up against the
massive stone columns of the railway bridge. The mahout must have
been stunned by the shock, for he pitched helplessly into the water.
But though it would have been an easy enough matter to put out a boat
from the shore to save the unconscious man from being swept away
by the current, not a single one of his fellow countrymen made any
attempt to do this, and the Ganges bore the man away to a Heaven
which would certainly at least be better than what he had known on
earth.

One has to have technical knowledge to go buying elephants, and
Johannsen happened to be fitted with real 'elephant sense/ Another
factor was that we often enough had to deal with a whole string of
owners who all had some sort of 'mortgage* on the animal. Whenever
we did conclude a purchase we would repair to the tent of the latest
mortgagor, and the Indians would begin testing every rupee either
with their teeth or by tossing it up high, to judge of the ring when it
fell, and when one had to pay out a price of some two thousand
rupees this business could take hours. But in India time is of no great
importance. Only if an elephant broke loose would the owners show
any tendency to 'look sharp,' but then the whole gang of claimants
would be off, with shrill cries, to get their 'property' back.

In the end, during this particular year's fair, over eight hundred
elephants passed through Sonpur market, a traffic which was of course
not without its 'incidents.' One night a regular monster of a beast
broke loose, a male tusker it was too for there are also, of course,
the mukna elephants, which have no tusks. This fellow tore like an ex-
press locomotive across the few yards which separated it from our
tent, plucking the tent pegs out of the ground so that the thing
collapsed on us. The elephants we had already bought set up an excited
trumpeting. We were out of our tent in no time, but the old bull was
already well away over the hills.

All round us were encamped upper-caste Indians, accompanied by
numerous servants. When any newcomer arrived, his servants took
over the rectangular space hired from the market manager, clearing

THE INDIAN'S WEALTH THE ELEPHANT

away tree stumps and refuse, moistening the hard ground with Ganges
water and sweeping it smooth. Immediately the blazing sun dried it
and turned the space to a hard floor. On this a tent was next erected,
and the ground covered with magnificent carpets and rugs. A low wall
marked the boundaries between one of these family camping grounds
and another. They were in gay array all round our encampment. But
I was still such a greenhorn that I never realised that it was a great
insult to an Indian to go across his ground there were no set roads
and thus, as I went my ways to and fro, I unwittingly outraged one
party after another, earning savage looks and muttered curses. At last I
actually saw some Indians get to their feet at once and go away from
the place.

A further stupidity followed. I was such a simpleton that I still took
all Indians for poor men, so when I saw that I had caused offence I at
once tried to put things right by offering a tip. This was refused with
great indignation, and it was a very good thing when Johannsen ex-
plained to me that merely to tread, even to cast one's shadow over
ground, if one was unclean that is to say either of a lower caste or
an unbeliever sullied the ground of a caste-conscious Indian, and he
properly had no other course but to abandon it.

While Johannsen sat in our tent and perspiringly pursued his end-
less dealing with the elephant owners, I wandered at leisure to and
fro through the market, ever more thirsty for impressions. 'Kabr da
Sahib! 3 came a cry 'Look out, sir! 1 I pressed back into the dense
wall of sightseers, through which a powerful elephant was striding.
It was a bull. Never had I seen an animal in such heavy chains. From
the powerful tusks to the front legs, from front legs to hind legs, and
back again from hind legs to tusks were really heavy chains, which
rattled horribly to the tread of the elephant's huge feet. On the
animal's neck sat its mahout. On either side ran a man armed with a
long spiked pole.

Some hours later I suddenly heard a great shouting. In a second, all
the mahouts standing near me were on the backs of their own ele-
phants. Something must have happened. Looking in the direction of
the shouts, I now saw a human body, which must somehow have been
tossed into the air, falling to earth again. A moment later, sprawled
out on the scene of this unhappy incident I saw a gruesome sight. That
same bull elephant had just seized his mahout in his trunk, tossed him
into the air, then pinned him to the ground with his long tusks.
Immediately, the savage animal was surrounded by working elephants

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

which had hurried to the spot, and under the protection ot those
powerful assistants the rebel was chained again. No formalities fol-
lowed, no doctor came, no death certificate was made out. The dead
body was merely put on a stretcher and removed. When soon after I
passed the spot, a new mahout was standing passively in front of the
same elephant, the tusks of which were still red with blood, and
giving the animal its ration of fodder.

But how does a mahout first chain an elephant is the question. This
was an art which I had opportunities of witnessing both here in Son-
pur and elsewhere in India on many occasions. A freshly caught ele-
phant quite naturally opposes any touch of the human hand. It is out
of the question to get up on to the back of such an animal, for the
elephant knows very well what that is all about, and at amazing speed
will twist this way and that to prevent it happening. For this reason,
the only thing a mahout can do is get straight on to the elephant's
neck. But how is he to do even that?

The first thing is to teach the captured elephant to lie down when
told to do so, and to get up again when told. This lesson is achieved by
lowering a saddle-bag arrangement on to its back from a tree-top.
This has a heavy weight in it. When at last the elephant gives way and
settles down, its mahout yells the command for 'Lie down' and at the
same time feeds the animal some paddy, or unhusked rice, well tied
up in a bundle of rice straw.

As soon as an elephant has learned this first lesson, the mahout's
next job is to get close to him. It is most inadvisable to try to do this
from the front, as the elephant immediately fights back with its tusks,
its trunk and its fore legs. So now with the help of working ele-
phants a rope is brought across the restive pupil and fastened down
to the ground then another across the neck. While other men hang
like grim death on to the irons on each leg of the elephant, the
mahout, nimble as a monkey, springs at last to straddle the animal's
neck.

In a flash the elephant is on its feet, intent on throwing off the
weight. But now he is given no rest. He is marched round and round
slowly between two working elephants as guards, and this is continued
till he learns to turn to left or right, according to which ear the
mahout tickles with his big toe.

The methods of training differ in detail in Ceylon, Sumatra, Assam
and Burma, and so of course do the commands. But everywhere the
drivers are the same, whether we know them as mahouts, oozies or

THE INDIAN'S WEALTH THE ELEPHANT

kornaks. A well- trained elephant has to know at least a dozen different
commands. There are elephants who know twice as many as this, and
they are spoken of with enormous respect.

Newly caught elephants cannot stand the smell of Europeans. When
at Sonpur I went too near a wild elephant, he suddenly began to flay
the earth with his trunk, as if to cry: 'Now, this is the limit!' This
earth-slapping with the loose trunk sounded like somebody swinging
an end of rubber hose against the sun-baked ground, but a moment
later this young bull had tucked his trunk up high again and then,
head down, he charged violently towards me until, twanging like
violin strings, his leg chains pulled him up short.

At last, Johannsen had bought all he wanted. We dismantled camp,
loaded everything on a number of working elephants and took our
departure. In front went the elephant leader, a tame animal, with me
riding behind his mahout. Next came the smaller ones, to set the pace,
and the procession was brought up by Johannsen on No. 8, to see that
nothing was missing. Our road led through a number of shallow rivers,
at each of which we halted, to give the animals an opportunity to
bathe, a pleasure in which they all shared most readily.

While the larger ones were often satisfied, after a long drink, with
giving themselves a shower with their trunks, the young elephants
tumbled in like excited children, pushing each other under, squirting
water over each other and gambolling about so merrily that we often
roared with laughter. One of the mahouts dived in once with his
elephant and had a fine game, seeing who could remain longest under
water. Of course the elephant won, holding his trunk above water
like a schnorkel tube on a submarine. But when the mahout spotted
the trick and held the trunk down, it turned out that the elephant
could not hold his breath any longer than his mahout could.

We continued our journey through India. The sun blazed down, till
as we marched, each day, the elephants would in the end stick their
trunks into their mouths, to moisten them with their own spittle.
That was a clear sign that they were beginning to suffer from the sun,
and must be got to water as soon as possible.

o r

The sand in a river bed which we crossed glittered and shone in
the sunshine. 'Gold dust,' said Johannsen, and while in the terrible
heat I swayed to and fro on my elephant I dreamed of machines which
might, as I thought, bore deep into that soil and gather in the gold.
Prophetic dream! Soon after this I had an opportunity of making
numerous if unlawful borings in India. But what I bored was not the

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

ground, for gold. In the good sweat of my own brow, I bored the good
teak floors of the Indian railway boxes allotted us. I bored holes
through which to pass the ropes with which, painful yard by yard, we
dragged the foot-bonds of those elephants, so unwilling to enter the
travelling homes prepared for them. Once we did get an elephant in,
we quickly passed the rope under the wagon and fastened it firmly.
By the time that they were all in, my hands were nicely blistered, and
there was nothing I so hated the sight of as a hand drill and bit.

Arriving at Calcutta- Alipore, we camped near the local zoo, one
of the few in the world which knows no coal bills. In the winter
months, it is true, they do say the mornings strike a little cool,
according to Indian standards. But their remedy for this is to hang
some rush mats outside the animal stalls !

Once here, our tent was soon surrounded by native animal trainers,
who all knew Johannsen. After we had loaded our animals aboard, I
thought I was going to have the pleasure of going up the Brahmaputra
with a native crocodile hunter, for we had a commission to fulfil for
an American museum, which wanted two giant gavias specimens of
a large sort of pointed-nosed crocodile which often reaches the length
of thirty or more feet.

But then came a telegraph boy! It was Father, cabling from Stel-
lingen : 'Load consignment at once on s.s. Ehrenfeld, remainder taken over
by Walter Ebert arriving Calcutta fortnight later. 1 When I read that I
howled like a moony dog. It was to be thirty years before I ever saw
India again.

However, there was little time to be spent bewailing my bad luck.
The Ehrenfeld was to arrive the very next evening, and we were going
to have our hands full if we were to get our animals on board. Not that
the black panthers, the gayals, the antelopes or the cranes presented
much difficulty, but those elephants made up for it. This was their
first sea journey and for me the first transport for which I was
personally responsible. Johannsen was to stay with the rest of the
elephants. To help me I had after all got experienced Kudrat and his
one-eyed colleague Suku.

At Calcutta there were no enormous crates for loading, such as we
had at Hamburg. Each animal had to be heaved on board in a canvas
sling, improvised simply by passing a big tarpaulin under the animal's
belly. This would be gripped by the crane and swung into the air, to
the din of a terrible trumpeting, and the stuff which those anxiety-

THE INDIAN'S WEALTH THE ELEPHANT

ridden beasts cast away from their bodies as ballast when they first
found themselves airborne was no joke.

Among our purchases there was also a large female elephant bought
from the Calcutta Zoo. The curator of this warranted the dear
creature's benignity, but we were a bit suspicious, because we had
noticed that the keepers did not seem to show any particular grief at
losing her. Indeed, it was something much more like great relief
which seemed to ooze out of every pore of their being.

'You keep your weather eye open, Lorenz,' said Johannsen. 'That
old dear has a nasty look in her eye.'

At that very instant the good lady was swung up into the air, but
before the crane had deposited her on deck her neck-rope had slipped
loose. In a flash I had slipped the loose end of the rope through a deck
ring and tied a couple of tight hitches in it. And not a second too soon !
She was scarcely on her feet when that sling came flying in rags past
our heads, and the next thing I was to see was that trunk waving
ominously as its owner rushed at me. Like greased lightning I flew
away up that deck ! Thank heavens, my rope held, and then, with the
aid of some working elephants, Kudrat succeeded in chaining the
termagant to her allotted portion of deck.

As the steamer cast off, Johannsen ashore merrily waved greetings
to Hamburg. On this voyage there was no thought of fancy-dress
antics or dances. I was the only passenger, and I had to share my cabin
with a small orang-utan, which in Calcutta had been fed exclusively
on bananas. Now, bananas are no doubt very healthy things, but a diet
of nothing but bananas can give even an orang-utan the pip. Not one
did he even touch while he was with me. On the other hand, my pea
soup or bean soup with bacon delighted his heart. And when one day
there was spotted Dick for dinner, my monkey beat all the ship's
records, and from then on the crew all knew him as 'old Plum-
duffer.' The name stuck till he reached Hamburg complete with
wonderful biceps and a regular paunch. Not that the biceps came from
plum duff consumed. He got them by tearing and breaking up every-
thing that was not snugly put away or solidly nailed to the deck.
When on one occasion in the early days I left him locked in my cabin,
he exercised his exploratory genius on the lockers, and had a grand
time tearing everything up, to crown which he poured the contents
of the paraffin lamp over the heap of debris. What in fact Plum-duffer
craved was company, and eventually I secured this for him in the shape
of two gay little rhesus monkeys, which I introduced to him as play-

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

mates. Thereafter I had no trouble: the three bounded all over the
ship together, to the delight of the men.

But the captain grumbled. 'When we draw in to Hamburg, you'll
never catch them,' he said pessimistically. We bet a bottle of cham-
pagne on it. What is more, I undertook to have them in charge within
a couple of hours.

With a disbelieving laugh, the captain turned in for forty winks.
One of the monkeys was having a nice time on the upper deck, where
the officer of the watch was feeding sweetmeats to it, trying to catch
it, but the moment he made an attempt off went that monkey up the
rope which controlled the ship's siren. In the same instant that instru-
ment blew loud and long, breaking the midday stillness of the Indian
Ocean. AH hands on deck! What the captain was bellowing was largely
drowned by the siren. There was, however, no doubt about what he
meant, and all hands set to work to try to catch the animals. The clock
stood at one forty-five when (rather timidly, I must admit) I pointed
out to the captain that after all it was I who had caught them, and
fifteen minutes before time was up, too 1 I did it with a trap baited
with bananas. His anger subsided at once, and with a laugh he forked
out to pay his bottle of champagne bet.

Towards the end of that journey the Ehrenfeld was already steaming
into the Hamburg Canal a small elephant suddenly went down with
constipation. All the cures put together which worked with horses
proved useless. Then I suddenly recalled the remarkable avalanche
which had fallen from that big Calcutta Zoo dame elephant when we
hoisted her aloft, so I at once had a sling rigged. The donkey engine
heaved the constipated elephant a foot or so off the deck, while both
my Indians belaboured it with split bamboo sticks. I should add that
such a beating is hardly felt at all by an elephant, but, combined with
suspension above terra or deck firma, this tickling sensation had
the desired effect. In fear and trembling that elephant emptied itself at
top speed and in colossal amounts.

I was much relieved by the happy issue of my improvised cure. Re-
lieved of its internal pressure, my Jumbo immediately regained his
appetite, and this I utilised to get his halter on. Towards twelve I
finished off the cure with a large tub of lukewarm water, into which I
put a bottle of rum and an unbelievable quantity of sugar. With eyes
streaming with tears of laughter the crew crowded round to see
Jumbo take his grog.

It was December 2 3rd when the first consignment of big game

THE INDIAN'S WEALTH THE ELEPHANT

which I had handled reached Hamburg docks in good condition, and it
was good to have a word of praise from my father. The old boy had
just come back from America, where he had been making his arrange-
ments for participation in the big world exhibition at St. Louis. In
company with some American partners, he was going to establish a
large menagerie at that show on the lines of the Arctic Panorama on
the Heiligengeist Field, with the difference that now he was going to
show animals from all over the world in fitting landscape settings.
There was also a proposal, to which Father had agreed, to ship our
best troupe of trained animals to America to take part in the circus
menagerie which was to be built up for this St. Louis exhibition.

'ON THE PIKE* AT ST. LOUIS, U.S.A.

TEN YEARS earlier my father had unintentionally made his d6but in the
U.S.A. as an animal tamer appearing in the ring. My uncle, Heinrich
Mehrmann, who was at this time the producer of the big mixed troupe
of performing animals the largest ever shown so far had suddenly
gone down with typhoid. Hence it was my father who appeared
before all the many pressmen who had flocked from all the states to
the opening of the Chicago Exhibition. He went straight to the central
cage, where the lions and tigers were, to demonstrate his method of
mastering them by kindness. From that day our name was made in the
United States !

When in March 1904 we stood on board the s.s. Bethania and he
was bidding me goodbye, 'Lad,' he said to me, 'I want you to take
care we don't lose a single elephant.' He was indeed not a little wor-
ried, for he was putting the largest group of exotic animals which we
had ever handled directly into my hands. Twenty elephants had been
sold to Thompson and Dundee and there were also two bachelor ele-
phants which were going to the largest menagerie in the world, that of
Luna Park on Coney Island. There were also eight others for the circus
of the Ringling Brothers (who were of German extraction, then in
close connection with Barnum and Bailey, who later bought them out),
hi the transport there were still eight other elephants, including a
cow and baby Jumbo. These belonged to our own proposed show at
St. Louis.

That made thirty-six elephants in all, not to speak of the other wild
animals, trained and untrained, all in box-wagons, cages, tanks and
baskets, covering the decks of the ship.

A Hansa steamer had just berthed beside the Bethania, with five
large working elephants on board, which I was also to take, and in the
Bay of Biscay these had suffered severely from the foul weather. They
were huddled on the deck, warming the tips of their trunks between
their clenched fore legs, and there seemed a good chance that they
had caught lung or liver chills. But even if it were one of these
monsters, weighing over three tons, that suffered on the crossing, I
should be to blame.

'ON THE PIKE 1 AT ST. LOUIS, U.S.A.

'Take great care, Lorrie 1 ' said my father yet again, almost mena-
cingly, and I think he must have heaved as tremendous a sigh of relief
as I did when at last I telegraphed from New York : 'Arrived safe without
loss. 9 Our predecessor Noah cannot have felt a bigger load slip from
his shoulders, getting the Ark on to Ararat, than I did when the
captain berthed that ship. The fifteen assistants and watchmen I had
on board with me must also have thanked their stars when they saw
the Statue of Liberty which, four years my junior, was still at the
time only a flapper of nineteen.

There was a tremendous crowd of reporters and curious sightseers
awaiting our Bethania ark at the quayside at Hoboken. The gangway
was not properly down when those pressmen stormed on board. Our
customers were there, to shake my hand, and I made the acquaintance
of both Thompson and Dundee, two smart young fellows. They had a
fleet of twenty giant pantechnicons trucks, they called them
waiting, to start the triumphal progress of their elephants to Luna Park.

The pantechnicons were drawn by eight horses each. The tranship-
ment went off perfectly. The only trouble was that the travelling case
of the largest working elephant was going to be too big to go under
the very first railway bridge on the road. Ten New York carpenters
arrived forthwith with tools, and in two hours' time they had lowered
the box by a couple of feet. True, the elephant himself stuck up out
of it, but he at least had knee joints, and could be made to bob as the
truck came up to each bridge, and so, with much elephantine bobbing
and curtseying, the procession made off.

To tell the truth, the arrival of this herd of Jumbos had sent a scare
running through all American zoo and circus folk, and those present
all had elephant goads up their sleeves or under their coats. Those boys
were running no risks. Besides, if any of those elephants did run amok
in New York, each man was out to be the one to catch the headlines !

So, while the remaining elephants were loaded into railway trucks,
Thompson and Dundee's party rolled off to Luna Park, travelling
through the heart of the great city. The clatter of one hundred and
sixty horses' hooves and the rumble of all those heavy trucks and their
loads drew crowds of thousands on the way to Coney Island, where,
patient as sheep, my poor worn-out elephants went to their stalls
without a hint of trouble. When, after supper, I went with the two
pleasure park entrepreneurs to see the animals in their stables, there
they lay already stretched out in fresh straw, their tummies comfort-
ably full, and snoring like huge bellows.

4 AML

ANiMALS ARE MY LIFE

The following morning I took a stroll with Frederic Thompson
through Luna Park, and saw that in design and layout it was not con-
sidered the finest outfit in the New World for nothing. Not only were
there the usual steam roundabouts and so forth and the customary
attractions, but Thompson and Dundee had also produced a display
which was making New Yorkers wildly enthusiastic. It was described
as 'a combat with the flames.' The spectators looked down from an
amphitheatre of seats on to a reproduction of a city street intersection,
complete with trams, cars, porters, drunks coming out of a corner
bar, and all manner of added comical acrobatic attractions, all designed
to amuse the public.

This was presented with a cross-section of its own daily life, and the
culminating point was the arrival of a wedding coach which rolled up
to an hotel, when the bridal pair emerged and went up to a bedroom
on the third floor. They had scarcely had time to settle down (if that
is the word) for the night when there came a terrible explosion in the
basement of the building. For, as enormous lettering showed, below
the hotel there was a store of paints and oils. A terrible fire was now
produced by careful pyrotechnical devices, of course with
flames and smoke and showers of sparks. Ah ! but at the last moment
up came the brave firemen, to fight the conflagration with the latest
devices (of 1904), while the bride and bridegroom (the former of
course in a condition of extreme undress) leapt to safety on to the new-
fangled specially sprung landing carpet lield out for them !

It was to be the terrible quirk of fate, however, to turn the tables
on the organisers of this particular 'attraction.' While Thompson
and Dundee's Japanese cook and servants were serving them and
myself with red perch in tomato sauce, the genuine fire alarm went off
so suddenly and so shrilly that I swallowed a large fishbone ! The whole
flame-combating show was this time genuinely on fire, and it was the
real firemen who were called in. But they were powerless to rescue
the bridal couple from the third floor; the most they could do was
quench what had become a red-hot grill.

A week after my arrival in New York, Father came across from
Hamburg, and we went on together to St. Louis. The site of the World
Exhibition was already like a giant ant-heap. There seemed to be no
end to the craftsmen engaged, busily creating our world in miniature.
From Tyrolean mountain village to the Giant Wheel of Vienna, from
Trans-Siberian Railway to the Pyramids, here were the wonders of the
world in duplicate rising rapidly in plaster and timber against a back-

'ON THE PIKE' AT ST. LOUIS, U.S.A.

ground of 'sculptured* landscape, and complete with Chinese villages
and Eskimo igloos. The great monuments of Paris, Rome and Jerusa-
lem literally sprang into being overnight.

Immediately behind the exhibition ground ran the railway tracks.
Our working elephants were one day waiting to move off when sud-
denly two locomotives coupled together came hissing by. The noise
of their steam and the metallic rumble of the wheels terrified the
animals. Up went their trunks and with ears flung back they stormed
away, trumpeting loudly, and charged straight into the village of the
Philippine head-hunters.

These poor Igarots, a primitive Malayan tribe, had never seen an
elephant in their lives. And now the little brown-skinned folk sud-
denly beheld giant pigs bigger than they could ever have dreamed of.
When they had recovered a little from terrible fright they came to seek
us out. They were clad in no more than loin-cloths, and were a sight
worth seeing, for if in our animal paradise we had lacked Adams and
Eves, now we had them staring in amazement at all the animals of
the world, ranged before their gaze. Words failed them; indeed, they
had none in their language for the principal topic, elephants, but they
did have a lot to say about giant pigs with a tail at either end.

Adjacent to the Japanese village was the pitch set apart for 'Carl
Hagenbeck's Trained Animal Show.' This was a mammoth circus
erection, behind which there was a large area fenced off into jungle,
primeval forest, fjord and pack ice landscapes, all realised much in the
same way as in Hamburg we had built up our Arctic Ocean Panorama.
In these surroundings, our animals were absolutely at liberty. The gully
with the lions and tigers was indubitably one of the greatest wonders
'on the pike,* to use the American phrase of the day, in this enormous
amusement park.

My father was, however, soon called back to Hamburg, where, at
Stellingen, to the north of the city, on waste ground, he was busy
with the construction of his animal park. Before leaving, he appointed
me his representative in dealings with his three American partners.
One of these, Mr. Williams, was a dandy with polished finger-nails,
patent leather shoes and a huge diamond ring, who knew nothing at
all about animals. It irked him that the name Hagenbeck meant more to
the pressmen than did that of Williams. Despite his rather blatant
efforts to draw their attention, they clearly preferred to discuss things
with me and my good friends, tamers Reuben Carstang and Charly
Judge, who could tell them all about the animals and our methods of

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

training. In the unconventional American manner, everybody by now
called me 'Lawrence,' and at this time I became very enthusiastic
about the informal manners of those grown-up children, the Yankees,
with all their natural comradeliness which back in Hamburg would
soon have been stifled by starch and a thousand conventions.

Charly, Reuben and I shared a bachelor manage, with a jet-black
cook named Susie to treat us to momma's well-tried recipes. By her
unsurpassable strawberry shortcake Susie so established herself in my
heart that I picture her now as an enormous statue of apple-bulging
lovely short pastry above which gleam her radiant cheeks and that
enormous smile which spread till it touched her ear-lobes whenever,
our mouths crammed full, we praised her latest achievement in that
line.

Every day, when my two friends had completed their duties in the
central cage, we set out together to wander through the exhibition
and see all the sights for ourselves. What the seventy-six-year-old
French author Jules Verne had depicted in his Round the World in
Eighty Days aeronautical engineers had in fact not yet accomplished,
but skilled showmen certainly now had a good shot at the illusion of it.
One much- visited show was called Under and Over the Ocean. Here, in a
fantastic submarine restaurant, one could look out on to the sea bed
and see fish, crabs, turtles and sunken wrecks among rocks of coral
overgrown with oysters. One really did have the impression of moving
through that submarine world. To cater for every taste, there in the
greenish twilight of the ocean depths was a mermaid cavorting past the
observation windows. Nor was Paris any longer a distant city, for a
tense 'time- table' swept the submarine through Atlantic waters and
up the Seine, to moor in the heart of the capital of France. Up a few
steps, nearby, one could go straight back to America in a giant airship
of really far more ingenious construction than our Count Zeppelin
was to think up : underneath the hint of a balloon there dangled in
fantastic fashion the superstructure of an ocean steamer. One could
lean on the rail of an upper promenade deck and gaze down on night-lit
Paris, constructed as the guide proudly whispered to us from
twenty thousand sheets of pasteboard. The deck would then begin to
sway, and hidden fans created the breeze one felt, sweeping through
the air, while down below one saw the landscape slowly slip away,
so that one could imagine that one's airship was flying over the
English Channel. On came the lights first of Brest, then of London,
while for the Atlantic crossing the showman had provided yet further

'ON THE PIKE* AT ST. LOUIS, U.S.A.

ingenious machinery, which supplied the rising moon, and just for
variety a storm by night complete with thunder, lightning and Irench-
ing rain, till with a sigh one suddenly saw New York sunlit New
York beneath one, and the airship came safely down at the St.
Louis World Exhibition !

Daily the stream of visitors increased and the dollars rolled in, while
the showmen rubbed their hands. The Tower of Babel must have been
like that scene. Folk of all the world's races, colours and religions
met here, flat-footed Tyroleans, Chinese conjurers, Japanese geishas,
singing Makakas from the South Seas, African tribes and Eskimos in
skins. Certainly there was not one visitor who did not mark down on
his show card 'See Carl Hagenbeck's Trained Animal Show. 9

Immediately behind our pitch, just outside the Exhibition, there
was a 'Wild West* hotel The Outside Inn 1 it was called at the
bar of which the cowboys of the rough-riding arena and Indian chiefs
met for drinks as soon as their show was over. Some fifty of the best-
known Indian tribes had erected a picturesque wigwam camp at St.
Louis, and their parades were suggestive of nothing else but German
carnival shows, transformed into the glorious colours of the native
peoples of North America. There were scenes there calculated to en-
thuse every lad whose heart was in Wild West stories. Here rode
Apaches, Sioux, Winnebagos and Senecas. Here the Blackfoot Indians
danced their scalp and buffalo dances. Ambushes of the mail coach,
shooting displays, riding displays, and bull-driving displays changed
place with pageants of the story of the American drive into the Middle
West. I think that Indian show was one of the most colourful genuine
shows that I have ever seen. It gave one a glimpse of a great past, in
which those redskins were still the lords of the North American
prairies.

On June loth we celebrated Father's birthday in the 'Cowboy
Bar. ' Our circus band blew lustily, and we had such a thorough booze-
up that Charly Judge got the crazy idea of bringing one of our trained
elephants from its stable to drink its tot to Father's health, a madcap
or should I say a mad-cup idea ; but, on the one hand, elephants do
like a drop of liquor, and, on the other, it takes more than one double
whisky to put an elephant out.

So off whisked Charly, till suddenly the door-frame of that pub
groaned, and there was the elephant the frame of that door like a
sort of collar round its neck. Jumbo was now persuaded to sit down on
a beer barrel and he got his glass. There was a fanfaronade from the

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

band, and then everybody wanted the speech. * Where's Bauer? 1
Bauer was our press manager, but, poor fellow, he had been snoring
soundly some time since up in the pub's attic. Nothing doing, off
went some ready fellows, to bring him straight from his warm bed,
just as he was, in his nightshirt. Whether he wanted to or not, still
tipsy with sleep, he had to get up, barefoot, on to a table and pro-
nounce a birthday speech to our boss in distant Hamburg.

Bravo ! Everybody by now was so cock-a-hoop that after being well
treated Charly had to take the company for rides on the good ele-
phant. But that was more than the floor of the bar could stand. The
following day I learned that our good host himself had eventually
taken refuge up his own chimney, thinking that all the more fragile
parts of the building were going to come tumbling about his ears.

From St. Louis I went to Cincinnati, Ohio, to visit Sol Stephan,
once our representative and now in charge of the local zoo. I found a
fine veteran at the game, whose great-grandparents had settled in
America. Sol Stephan was a great friend of my father's and I always
called him 'my American father.' The friendship continued till 1949,
when at the fine age of a hundred old Sol died. In his youth he had
travelled with a menagerie, and it was to this that he owed his later
position as zoo curator. In those days, nobody in the United States
bothered about diplomas or suchlike papers. The man who could
collar a job and hold it down was the man they wanted. Sol's little
office at the entrance to his zoo became a great meeting-place for
American zoo owner-proprietors, who were always glad to discuss
things with the old man and do business with him too. When on this
occasion I went to see him, he was still our representative.

There were at that time a number of real eccentrics among Ameri-
can show folk, and one of these was John E. Robinson. Robinson had
one peculiarity he was utterly incapable of pronouncing a single
ordinary sentence. Everything he said was interlarded with resound-
ing oaths of all kinds. They were so much second nature to him that
he certainly did not even know that he used them. We were sitting in
the little office over a glass of whisky, the skies darkening ominously
and a sharp storm blowing up, with thunder and lightning, when there
was suddenly a terrific burst right overhead. 'Jesus Christ, that was a
terrible clap!' cried Sol. Robinson reproved him. 'God damned to
hell, Sol,' he cried, 'how can you swear when such a terrible storm is
on?' and himself dived straight under the table.

When I got back to St. Louis, I found a letter from my father in-

'ON THE PIKE* AT ST. LOUIS, U.S.A.

structing me to find a good place in the States to buy mules. Fortu-
nately, the place was not far off, for East St. Louis was '.he ceatre of
that trade. There were at the time reckoned to be 3,400,000 mules in
the U.S.A., a sixth part of the draught animals of the country, in fact.
The largest mules I saw were eighteen and a half hands high at the
withers and weighed around 1,760 Ib. I fulfilled my father's request
and sent a number of animals of this size to Hamburg.

Though the mule's qualities of contentedness, toughness and per-
tinacity in comparison with horses cannot be denied, we were never-
theless not successful in selling many to private owners. Self-conscious
brewery draymen in Germany threatened the bosses with a strike, for
they saw themselves becoming the laughing-stock of their fellows if
they were to harness those long-eared 'giant donkeys' and drive them
through the streets. And in the meantime the motor-car settled the
question. It was only mountain troops which in the 191418 war
found mules irreplaceable, faithful assistants.

Towards the end of the World Exhibition, the attendance had
grown so much that the show was prolonged. At the Outside Inn in
those days there was whispering about a fire which was shortly to
break out. I considered it mere bar-counter talk, but yet it did occur
to me that if those quite worthless but highly insured buildings were
to be burned down it would bring somebody in a nice little sum.
Nevertheless, I was certainly astonished when the very next morning
after I first heard of it I received a kindly letter from an animal-loving
gangster and bosom friend of our baby elephant with the well-
intentioned advice to pull out with all my animals before the exhibition
ended.

Lee Williams examined his polished finger-nails a long time, grin-
ning sarcastically, when I showed him that letter, but all the same I
had my lion and tiger box-wagons brought round to the exhibition
ground, so that the animals could be kept in them when the show was
over each day, and not in the wooden stables built for them, and I also
trained my elephants for an alert and hired several teams of horses for
the rapid removal of our menagerie. Those horses cost me three
dollars each a day and Lee Williams was so wild about what in a show-
down exchange of epithets he called idiotic squandering of good money
that he refused to pay any part of it.

Meanwhile, the day before closing day came round, and without
consulting Williams I shifted all the movable animals to Olive Street,
where I had hired some tram-car hangars for the purpose. And just ITL

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

time. In the night I was awakened by wild shouting, then my window
suddenly broke, and a stone fell on my bed. I rushed out on to the
veranda in my nightshirt and at once sprang back again, for, only a
stone's throw away, flames were bursting from the Japanese Exhibition
and the wind was blowing our way and the heat growing fiercer every
minute. Hastily I raced down the corridor, shouting to everybody to
waken, and got my belongings together. Fortunately, the wind mean-
time changed suddenly, or our whole set-up, which consisted almost
exclusively of lath and plaster and straw matting, would have gone up
in flames.

The fire brigade came galloping out from St. Louis and their hoses
poured tons of water into the leaping flames, while with all my men
I succeeded in getting the wild animals out in time. All the others, of
course, were already snug under cover in the tram hangars.

Like moths to a candle the press boys came tearing in to that fire.
One shouted across to me as I made my way to Olive Street he was
already under the illusion that the Hagenbeck show had been com-
pletely destroyed. In such matters the good Americans are still rather
blind in their rivalries. Each pressman was afraid of the other paper
getting away with a better story, so the following morning, when I
glanced through the press, in the mass of heavy type with which all
the front pages were spread I not only learned that Hagenbeck's
Trained Animal Show was ended for ever, but was even able to see
lurid sketches depicting the process of alleged destruction.

How right too I was to fear that these wild stories would already be
spread by cable all over the world. I went as early as possible to the
post office, to send my father news that we were safe and sound,
animals and all, but I lost by a long head. News of the 'disaster'
reached my father simultaneously from Chicago and Cincinnati, and
even Dr. Hornaday, director of the New York Bronx Park, telegraphed
his condolences at the terrible loss. Further, through a misunder-
standing of the post office, my own telegram did not reach Father till
two days later, so that he had had time to send anxious telegraphic
inquiry to all his friends in Chicago and St. Louis, in his efforts to
ascertain if I too had lost my life. It was only on the third day that he
received my cheerful news.

After that fiery conclusion to the World Exhibition, which over-
night so undeservedly gave our zoological circus yet another boost, I
was faced with the question what to do next. My secret wish, which
was to turn to a mammoth circus tent and the life of the road, found

'ON THE PIKE' AT ST. LOUIS, U.S.A.

responsive ears in my three American partners. But I knew that
Father, through hi , own circus experience, was not in favour. 'No
Gypsy life for yoi ! ' he had always preached.

But back home , at Stellingen, we were in the throes of construction
work, and for the. moment we simply had not got the housing space
for all the groups of performing animals which we now had In America.
So my brother Heinrich came out post-haste from Hamburg, and the
upshot of it all was that altogether we two founded the first real
travelling circus of the name of Carl Hagenbeck, to nnke a tour of the
United States.

With fiery enthusiasm, Al Bode, wagon builder, of Cincinnati,
undertook to construct the necessary road wagons. Albert, as he was
called, was one of the most painstaking wagon builders I have ever
seen. Only the very best timber would do for him, and, after going
through America, some of the pantechnicons he made, with all their
carved and applied ornament in the taste of the day, found a place in a
circus museum there, where they can be seen to this day. Dweller
caravans, such as we were used to in Germany for the human personnel
of the circus, were not customary in the U.S.A. That need was satis-
fied by a railway company supplying us with old Pullman cars, which
were transformed into mobile dormitories for our animal keepers, our
drivers and our tent men.

Tent makers, saddlers, costumiers and printing presses were all set
to work, and I was able to slip away to Hamburg, where, as usual,
Father was assembling as many of the family as he could round the
Christmas tree. Three weeks later, I was back in St. Louis, for I
needed to make haste to find and purchase the horses I needed before
our start.

In those days there was of course no motorised transport, for the
newfangled machines were still not taken quite seriously when they
tootled through St. Louis at 'fully twelve miles an hour* ! For our pur-
pose the horse still had no rivals. So I went to Diamond Bill. Diamond
Bill was one of America's richest horse-breeders, residing at Lancaster,
Missouri. One saw the reason for his nickname the moment one saw
him, for he was covered with diamonds, even having a couple in his
two gold-crowned front teeth. After a long railway journey and a
neck-breaking drive by night, we reached an isolated, poorly lighted
ranch and I bargained for and bought a hundred horses. A team that is
to say, a pair in harness together cost at that time three hundred and
seventy-five dollars.

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

While we were riding over Diamond Bill's ranch, I was struck by a
lovely white horse, and acquired 'Prince' for myself, while with
much demonstrative hand-gripping and okays I bought another fine
animal for my personal buggy. Diamond Bill was a great character and
delivered all the horses on time at St. Louis, where we had estab-
lished winter quarters, still in the tram-car sheds, and from early to
late our performing animals continued their training.

We began our first United States tour at St. Louis in true American
fashion with three simultaneous riding rings and two stages, all inside
a tremendous marquee. I rather regret this today. Had we offered our
audiences a first-class programme in one central ring, as for tens of
years I did subsequently, everywhere in the world, with great results,
we should have saved ourselves enormous outlay. Our cashier had to
raise no less than twelve thousand gold marks, no small sum in those
days, for our mere daily expenses. And though that sum, of course,
covered all current outgoings, it did not cover wear and tear, which
under the rapid transport conditions customary in America was also a
very big item.

Every single day we played in a fresh town. Every night our special
trains rolled on. That is the American pace of doing things, still kept
up by the biggest circus in the world, the RBBB Show. RBBB stands
for Ringling Bros., Barnum and Bailey's Combined Shows. RBBB
open their season every year with a special star show of several days in
Madison Square Garden, New York. After that it is a rare town in
which they stay longer than two days.

Comfortable living quarters in caravans and all the romantic life
of the road of the German circuses are totally unknown in the U.S.A.
Circus life there is today, as it was then, extraordinarily exhausting,
with a tremendous bill in wear and tear for men, animals and equip-
ment alike. We packed no less than ninety-six men, two to a bed, in
three layers, in our specially adapted Pullman cars. Tent workers,
drivers and animal keepers alike flopped down on their bunks dead
tired, sodden with perspiration, generally without even undressing,
even with their boots on, oblivious to the world from lack of sleep.
The tent builders were as a rule athletic negroes. One foreman and
five men made a team, and each team had its precise work mapped out
for it.

To give an idea what sort of men these were, let me tell a little
story. In one of the teams whose job it was to wield eight-pound
hammers and drive in the tent irons, we had two black fighting-cocks

'ON THE PIKE 1 AT ST. LOUIS, U.S.A.

who were always at one another's throats. I gave them a talking to and
said I wanted to see them do a bit of hammer-swinging too. Suddenly
one of the pair started up the quarrel again, and instead of swinging
his hammer on to a tent iron he swung it on to the crisp woolly skull
of his rival.

When I arrived on the scene, the victim was sitting on a stool inside
the tent, while a doctor bandaged his blood-spattered cranium. The
man was groaning and holding his temples. He complained of
headache ! The doctor shook his head. 'One of us, 1 he said, 'could not
have stood a quarter of the blow, but all it did to this beauty was bring
him to his knees.'

'Say, doc,' moaned the negro, in his lovely Southern English, 'you
don't think that blow's hurt my brain, do you?'

I comforted him and gave him a dose of whisky, and his mood
rapidly improved. The very same evening I saw the 'poor fellow'
again. With his straw hat clapped on top of his well-bandaged head,
with great II an he was dancing the cake-walk !

After a long night journey, we would reach the next town while it
was still dark, when the first task was to set up the kitchen and a large
dining marquee. By the time the flag was unfurled at the top of this
rallying point, a mighty breakfast was ready to be served for every-
body, and after that the reinforced hammer-boys got to work with
double energy. The same custom is still observed today in American
circuses.

Next came raising the big top and the menagerie tents. One after
another the wagons were drawn up and the unloading ramps put in
place. Each team did the same road only twice, no matter how many
horses were required. Finally, the animals were then fed, curried and
decorated, everything being made ready for the great parade.

There were brass bands in open wagons or on horse back, then
magnificent menagerie wagons with lions and tigers, clowns, dancing
girls, acrobats, stilt- walkers and dwarfs in a costumed procession.
The American burghers would be most disappointed if there were not
at least one veiled 'Indian Princess' peeping 'shyly' out through the
curtains of the howdah on her elephant. Teams of zebras and camels
always delighted farming folk. In front of all this I rode my dazzling
white Prince. To this day I can hear the music of the band, for once
the bandmaster had discovered my favourite tunes he played them all
the way across America.

This circus parade would last about two hours. By midday the

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

animals were all back in their stalls, the horses fed a second time, and
till seven in the evening there would be absolute peace, till the
audience began to pour in through the main entrance or would it
merely trickle in?

Gates open! What countless times I have stood and watched the
crowds pouring in yellow, black, red, white men. Gates open!
There is the test, each time, whether publicity, place and time have
been well chosen, or it was sheer stupidity to pitch the tents at all in
that particular place. For you can do whatever you like and lay out
unheard-of sums on publicity, yet see that incalculable creature, mass
man, refuse to come out whereas go on to the next town and they
storm the cash desk !

How familiar the consolatory words of one's assistants become!
Monday is a bad day. Tuesday is never any good, either. Who thinks
of going out anywhere on a Wednesday? Thursday? That is a wash-out
too. Surely you know that Friday is payday? Yes, but the money is
never spent till Saturday. (Sundays there was never any show in
America anyway.) 'Surely, sir, you don't expect a full house in such
rain, (heat, cold, storm)? But we're right at the end of the month!
We're right at the time when people go away for their holidays!
We're just a week after the annual fair ! Didn't you know that the folk
are all out in the fields just now?'

I am sure the director of the Circus Maximus in Rome knew this
litany as well as I do, though perhaps he did not pay the losses out of
his private purse, as I did! Against all this gloom I can only remark
that we have on occasion played without any canvas, in the open air,
in a sea of mud and in deep snow and had a full gate, turning all
calculations upside down !

Circus shows are lotteries, and no blah, no lucky star, no talisman
helps. I have put on the show on a Friday which was the thirteenth of
the month and had an empty house, but I have done the same else-
where and had it packed out. To this day nobody has the slightest idea
of the secret recipe by which the owner of a travelling circus can be
sure of becoming a millionaire.

Talking of standing at the gate when folk were coming in, I re-
member once in Pennsylvania seeing a youngster nearly six feet tall
with a children's under-fourteen ticket, and as he pressed his way
through the turnstile in my best English I asked him how old he was.
He turned to a rather scraggy old farmer and in the best North German
dialect inquired: 'Dad, how old am I?' 'Thirteen, you damn fool,'

'ON THE PIKE 1 AT ST. LOUIS, U.S.A.

said the old man in the same language. I could not help wishing the
couple the best of luck in their own tongue, adding that Papa was a
lucky man to have such a fine boy of thirteen and I wished the boy the
same good fortune some day. Scarlet to the ear-tips they made them-
selves mighty scarce in the crowd.

Our performances lasted exactly one hour forty-five minutes. There
was no detailed working out of separate items, as in Germany, with all
the audience concentrating on the ring in a programme well planned
and spaced out with music. Here there was just one continuous circus
fireworks display in three rings and on two stages at once, and the
moment any turn ended the performers made off to rest, flopping
down in the grass or under a wagon to snatch a little more sleep.

When the audience emerged, dizzy enough, from this wild kaleido-
scope, they were the prey of the ready-lemonade sellers, who mixed
the liquor they sold by dissolving a startling yellow powder in water.
It was obligatory to have what were called floaters on top of this.
These were slices of lemon and apple, apparently considered a sort of
guarantee of the genuineness of the beverage.

After the evening shows, which ended a little before ten, a further
'night show* would be put on with angelic voices to boost it, for of
course it was all a matter of more money, and the tickets for this
dubious second house required all the arts of persuasion to sell them.
A couple of snake-charmer girls or something of that price level
usually sufficed to satisfy the suckers, while with record speed our
negroes with thunderous clatter took down the seats and packed the
circus up. This took literally seventy minutes, so that by one o'clock
in the morning we were well on the road again.

My personal coachman actually boasted the remarkable name
Dczimblewsky. In the list of personnel, however, he was to be found
under Z ; nobody thought of him as under D, or took any notice at all
of the first two letters. And as we had taken him over from the
Ringling circus, he was generally known quite simply as Ringling. He
had one great maxim : 'Fear God and chew hard and you will always
have plump cheeks.' And from morning to night one would see him
endlessly chewing at his favourite cud, which produced a lovely
supply of juice, for him to spit at intervals with highly trained pre-
cision. In those days, of course, long-distance precision spitting was in
America considered a great social accomplishment, and grand masters
of the art, meeting in the lounge of an hotel or at a railway station or
the barber's, would vie with one another, for there was always a big

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

spittoon at hand. Greenhorns who missed the pot earned considerable
scorn, and despite many good runners-up among the darkies Ringling
held our circus long-distance record. That, however, was the end of
his special accomplishments.

In every town, after the performance, Ringling used to be ready for
me with the buggy, to drive to the bank to pay in our takings. I used
to drive on such occasions, with our cashier, John Sheehy, at my side.
In his coat pocket John had a Colt six-shooter ready with the safety
catch up, and the cash-box was under the seat, protected by
Ringling' s broad shoulders. We also had Tiger, which was the most
loathsome hound I ever set eyes on, being a remarkable blend of bull-
dog and terrier. The escort, of course, was a kind of insurance for our
money.

Though most of these bank trips passed off without incident, on
one occasion, in Arkansas, a fellow whose appearance inspired little
confidence did leap out at us. But before Sheehy had had time to draw
his famous Colt, Ringling had shot, and the juicy brown stream caught
the fellow square in the eyes. That certainly halted him in his tracks,
and he stood staring, speechless, and no doubt imagining it was a
Tibetan lama who had passed.

Elephants had of old been my pets, though during that American
tour they often made me furious. Our staff was always leaving us, and
so in the early days I was often obliged to load my elephants aboard
myself. This happened at Buffalo, and there the animals suddenly took
fright. I leapt between the leading pair, got a hand on the ear of each,
and tried to stop them, but like a shot they were off, dragging me
down the railway embankment, and I had to do some fine athletic
work to keep my feet. Like a storm they raced straight through a
drainpipe manufactory, with two younger elephants at their heels. It
was not till we had gone some distance into the open country that I got
the animals quietened down and brought them to a halt. Tails! 1 I
then commanded, and at once they stood in Indian file, gripped each
other's tails with their trunks, and cheerfully trotted back to the
station.

That was not too bad, but in Iowa we missed out a town because all
my elephants ran away. Near the goods yard of the Des Moines station
was a lake, and it was blazing hot that day, so I gladly took advantage
of the patch of water to let the creatures enjoy a really good dip. That
unusual show of course drew hundreds of spectators. To get a better
view of the diving, splashing, water-squirting elephants the crowds

'ON THE PIKE 1 AT ST. LOUIS, U.S.A.

clambered up on to the sheet-iron roofs of the disconnected wagons,
as if about to cheer their own rugby team. But though five of my
Indians had gone in with the larger elephants, suddenly ill sixteen
trunks were raised high in the air and in a fit of panic the whole herd
of them swam to the other side of the lake and with shrill trumpeting
vanished into the woods on the far side. It was not till twenty-four
hours later that we had reassembled them all, and in order not to upset
the remainder of our tightly drawn schedule we had to miss out the
next place altogether. The loss to me was a round twelve thousand
dollars.

I now decided that the thing to do was to have a really strong man
to look after those pachydermatous friends of ours, so I put the
strongest American we had in charge. This fellow turned the scales
at exactly fifteen stones, and it was whispered of him that in self-
defence he had killed two men with his fists. They called him the
Star Kid, and he certainly was a colossus. He would have gone through
fire on my account, and I think the elephants saw in him a rather un-
fortunate miscarriage of their own race. Whether that was really the
reason or not, they were certainly very fond of him, while at the same
time they held his whip in serious respect. Star Kid and a couple of
stalwart Hamburger lads, on the payroll as animal keepers, formed the
backbone of our motley staff.

It was somewhere in Pennsylvania that one night the men charged
with loading suddenly went on strike and threatened to come to blows
if we insisted on going on working. Star Kid and his two lads piped
their warnings, and loading proceeded as per usual. But when the train
was assembled, the strikers deliberately switched the points wrongly,
and as they had also loosened the rails on the sleepers we had a box-
wagon of twenty horses tip over. In a twinkling, axes were to hand,
and in no time Star Kid and our Hamburg lads had smashed in the roof
of that truck to free the animals, which were terrified, struggling in a
tangled confusion. At that instant, up came one of the strikers to enter
an energetic protest. He said that opening box- wagons on our own
like that was an infringement of labour regulations. I could hear him
kicking up a terrible noise. Then suddenly there was silence. Later on
that evening I asked Star Kid what had happened. But Star Kid merely
shrugged his shoulders. 'That man,' he said, 'was so tired he just lay
down and fell asleep. '

The strike leader was still asleep when my staff loaded the horses
into another truck. I shone a lantern in the man's face, to be struck

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

by the look of the fellow's chin. One would have said that he had
collided with some very hard obstacle. But yet he was breathing very
peacefully, and he was in nobody's road where he had chosen to lie.
So, stuffing a five-dollar bill into his pocket for his 'pains,' I left him
alone, and was rather glad when the locomotive gave its moving-off
whistle without the fellow's having bothered Star Kid and his mates
again.

After we had covered 7,918 miles, that night melody of the United
States railways came to its end for me at last. We had put up our big
top in something like thirty towns before, after a farewell perfor-
mance at Lebanon, we retired into well-earned winter quarters at the
Carthage, Ohio, racecourse. The riding hall and many stables served as
quarters for the animals, and our basic staff made themselves busy with
repairs. Freed now from the treadmill of incessant travel and per-
formance, Charly, Reuben and I went to New York, where at the
Liichau Restaurant, famous meeting-place of German sea captains,
we astonished mine host and all the waiters by our prowess as appar-
ently starving trenchermen.

Christmas was now at hand again, so in December 1905- I at last
went back to Hamburg, taking with me Joe Stephan, son of old Sol of
the Cincinnati Zoo, and Father welcomed us both, just in time for the
Christmas celebrations.

M^5^^-V'V^w ^'/'s

A Rattlesnake-dangerously poisonous: the annular horny umwth at
the tip of the tail, which causes the rattle, can clearly k seen

SOUTH-WEST WITH TWO THOUSAND DROMEDARIES

WHEN I got home, it was to receive the startling news that the German
Government had entrusted us with the task of getting a thousand
dromedaries at top speed to the German defence forces in South- West
Africa. They were urgently needed. The army there had no draught or
riding animals for the Kalahari Desert, where the Herero people had
risen in rebellion.

'Like to take them out?' Father asked me. 'Menges is already out
in Massawa ; I am sure you could be of use to him. '

On January i7th, I reached Port Said by the postal packet s.s. /sis,
and as the Maria Menzel was not to arrive till somewhat later, I made
an excursion to Cairo to take a look at the zoo there, at that time in the
charge of Captain Flower. It would not have been surprising if in that
climate they had a magnificent collection of African wild animals to
show, but all the same the hippopotamus an animal out of the very
river which flowed almost at their door had come from Hamburg !
It was so much more reliable to order from Hagenbeck's catalogue
than to send out one's own animal trappers.

Together Captain Flower and I paced the magnificent mosaic walks
of the Cairo Zoo, and I learned from him that these were his greatest
bugbear as they were constantly in need of repair, and only skilled
Italian mosaic workers could be trusted to do die necessary work on
them satisfactorily. Bemoaning the tremendous expense of all this, he
explained that the mosaic was not originally laid for his zoo visitors,
but for the veiled odalisques who once took their pleasure in these
gardens, for this park had formerly constituted the harem gardens of
some high-placed Egyptian dignitary.

It goes without saying that I made an excursion to see the Pyramids.
For this purpose I hired a dromedary and thereby set the locals a real
puzzle, for those crafty sons of the desert were used to spotting their
customer's origins by his footwear. One glance at your shoes and they
expected to know what language to address you in. But my shoes were
Italian, I spoke English which was frankly American, my clothes were
cut by a London tailor, but their contents were genuine Hamburg
ware. And the Egyptians racked their poor brains more still over the

5AML

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFfi

way 1 rode my dromedary,* which is no easy animal to handle. For of
course they could not be expected to guess that at home in Hamburg
I had had quite a lot to do with the 'ship of the desert' and knew just
what to do with him.

Burning hot the gentle breeze of the Sahara blew steadily over the
dunes of sand, which glinted in the sun. The desert was one immense
yellow ocean, arched by an azure sky. Nearby, the four-thousand-year-
old Cheops' pyramid reared its twenty-five million cubic feet of stone.
And there was a dragoman, plucking at my leg, offering me a statuette,
of course minus arms and legs, but I bent down from my saddle and
in my best New York slang told the lad that I made the goddam things
myself. 'And how's business?' I asked. Without a moment's hesitation,
the young rogue took my breath away by asking me if I had any that I
could sell him! Sphinx-like, I gazed into the far distance.

Two days later, the Maria Menzel berthed at Port Said. The captain
was a knowledgeable young man, and he immediately invited me to go
gambling with him. Our way led through winding alleys, down steps,
through vaults, into a ghostly-lit room, in which a motley of persons
of dubious respectability was seated round the gambling table. The
captain immediately won 20, and as quickly lost it again. Finally he
rose from the table 10 down and swore like the money-divers who
ran down to the bank of the Suez Canal when our transport ship
slowly drew near, to be tricked by the sailors who threw trouser
buttons into the water for them to fish out.

At Massawa I shook Joseph Menges' hand. Menges was an old world
traveller of ours, the man who had been such a good uncle to us
during the cholera plague. Here everybody called him Mister Mungus.
All the natives loved and respected him. The Maria Menzel unloaded
the fodder it had brought from Hamburg, and here and at other
harbours of the Red Sea took on board the dromedaries which
Menges had already bought up. Grieger, our well-tried Siberian
traveller, managed the job of getting the 'ships of the desert' on board.
They clearly were not really seaworthy, but had to be trussed like
mail packets, loaded on to flat-bottomed native boats in which they
were taken out to the Maria Menzel, whose crane could then heave
them on board.

All the same, there was one dromedary which wriggled free as it

* The author, of course, was on the single-humped camel, more specifically and
hereafter in this book called the dromedary. The term camel includes the two-humped
'Bactrian' camel of Asia, or is used more specifically for this. Translator.

SOUTH-WEST WITH TWO THOUSAND DROMEDARIES

was being hoisted on board, and fell plump into the Red Sea. At once
in plunged the Arabs after it, and got a new strap under its belly and
up it went again. By this time, as a matter of fact, that dromedary
was swimming magnificently. I marvelled, however, that the operation
passed off with no untoward incident, for all round we could see the
spinal fins of countless sharks cleaving the surface of the blue waters.

When at last, with four hundred and three dromedaries and sixty
Arab assistant keepers on board, the Maria Menzel moved off and her
siren sounded farewell, I had only two days' time, for Father had now
instructed me by telegraph to take along the sister ship, Hans Menzel,
from Djibuti.

At Berbera I made a new friend and came upon an old acquaintance.
The first was Father Cyprian, a missionary who was teaching the curly-
headed little Somalis English, arithmetic, reading and writing, to
which on his own account he added singing. The young songsters were
burning to show me their skill, and as each of those shrill-voiced little
things was anxious to be first the noise they created made their cor-
rugated iron school hut vibrate from end to end.

The old acquaintance was our good Hersy Egeh, who as long ago as
1 89$ had led men and women of his tribe under my father's and Joseph
Menges' guidance to the great Somaliland in London show which they
put on at the Crystal Palace. I found his innumerable children were still
amusing themselves with a now very rattly old bicycle which Hersy
had taken back from London. It lacked brakes, wind in the tyres and
bell, but was nevertheless still giving good service, with Hersy promis-
ing to bring the children back new tyres from Hamburg. For he had
had a letter from my father asking him to go there the following year,
taking the whole tribe of them, to be present at the opening of our
Stellingen Animal Park.

Now, however, I was Hersy's guest. He placed a fine Arab stallion
at my disposal, very proud at last to be able to show me his own
country, which I certainly found as exciting as a Somali must find
Hamburg. We rode to a village some distance inland, and soon by the
distant clouds of dust saw that a great riding display, such as must de-
light any horse-lover, was in full swing. Their burnouses flying in the
wind, the cavalcade came galloping down on us. Suddenly they reined
in their horses and the audience leaned forward to watch. The dances
began.

Hersy Egeh rose to his full chieftain-like height in his picturesque
stirrups. I did not understand a single word of the speech he made,

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

but when he pointed to me and after my own name I heard * Mister
Mungus', the whole village yelled: 'Ayahovoh,' spears flew into the air,
and immediately there was a wooden box covered with a rush mat,
and I had a seat of honour, from which to observe the passionately wild
dances which followed 1

How often since then have I seen such performances in circuses,
animal parks and folk exhibitions, but none has ever impressed me so
profoundly as that spontaneous ordinary local holiday dance under the
burning sun of Somaliland.

Meantime that Government order, which at first had stipulated the
supply of one thousand dromedaries, had been altered, and we now
had to find two thousand of the beasts. To spare costs, Father wanted
me to charter additional transport locally in African ports. As there
was not a single ship at Berbera, Menges and I went on to Aden, a
fortified British strongpoint on the sea route to India. In vain at
Steamer Point we sought a dromedary-carrying steamer. Before we
could find transport on to Djibuti, I had the opportunity here of
seeing the water reservoirs which were being re-excavated. These
reservoirs catch the rains coming down from the mountains, a valu-
able thing at the hot Gateway of Tears, on the water route from Bab el
Mandeb. I was told by the corporal of an Indian regiment stationed
there that those reservoirs held twenty million imperial gallons of
water !

At Djibuti 'Mr. Mungus/ as the natives here too called him, hired a
house for us down on the shore. This may sound very grand, but it
merely meant a single whitewashed room with a door and two holes in
the wall. These holes in the wall were said to be the windows. All
night it seemed that all the cats and vermin of the neighbourhood used
them to go in and out. Outside, the sea murmured in the moonlight
and the hyenas howled, till I was dreaming that I was back in Hamburg,
where so often hyena cries had been my lullaby.

Suddenly I had the impression I was out on a deep sea swell. Every-
thing was swaying. Drowsy with sleep, I staggered to one of the
windows and looked out. There was nothing to be seen, only the
silvery moonshine over the midnight blue of the Gulf of Aden and the
peaceful murmur of the sea.

'Don't worry, Lorenz,' Menges' voice suddenly startled my
meditation. 'It was only a little earth tremor. You'll have to get used
to those out here* and he turned to the wall and was asleep again.

Meanwhile, the wind had risen, and a disgusting stench poured in

SOUTH-WEST WITH TWO THOUSAND DROMEDARIES

through the window holes. When I asked about it, Menges muttered
an answer, and I had learned that Djibuti's principal export article
was shark tails and fins, which the Chinese consider delicacies. The
remainder of the shark is thrown away. I had thought there must be a
stink-bomb factory nearby, and never dreamt I would one day find
myself actually eating and enjoying shark fins.

The following morning, one of our travellers, Ernst Wache,
arrived at Djibuti. Father had sent his very best men to Africa. He felt
he had need of all possible forces, if he was to supply that huge
Government order on time. At the Messageries Mari times agency we
learned that the s.s. Akbar which we had bespoken was to reach Aden
in the next few days, and while Menges through Chief Egeh as inter-
preter was bargaining with the drivers over a party of dromedaries
which had in the meantime come down from the interior, I went on
to Aden with Wache to await the steamer.

I could have been of no use in dromedary buying, for I had not
mastered the secret finger-language used in that trade. The following
was the procedure. Hersy Egeh and the seller took each other's hands
and covered them with a cloth. Thus they literally got into a huddle
and, unseen by any of the dromedary salesmen clustering round them,
bargained away unhindered to determine both fair price and Hersy's
share in it. It was all done by a complicated system of finger pressure,
and there was only one man working with Carl Hagenbeck of Ham-
burg who knew all the tricks of the East African dromedary trade,
and that was Hersy Egeh.

Our wait at Aden was terribly dreary. Day after day I squatted on
the quayside at Steamer Point and fished. As the sun went down the
eels would bite well, but they always held fast to their holes by their
tails. When I did pull in my first steely blue and about a yard long
the natives ran wildly, with cries of: 'A snake, a snake!' Once again
the old observation about country folk always being extremely cau-
tious in their diet proved true, but at our inn we had those eels
grilled for us and were delighted with them. They proved excellent
eating, and a pleasant change from the Arab bill of fare.

Near to our table squatted our host, cross-legged on his mat. He
was a genial Moslem, prepared to go to enormous pains to avoid the
slightest exertion. In a way, he was right. It was like an oven at Aden.
But his inertia went to strange lengths. When a maid wanted to give
the floor a sweep, he made not the slightest effort to get out of the
way, whereupon she unceremoniously grabbed the edge of his mat

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

and lugged the cross-legged figure a little to one side. That produced a
heartbreaking sigh from the corpulent body. * Verily, 1 he said senten-
tiously, 'man, as you see, is like a bird, here at one moment, there the
next.'

There was something in what he said. A fortnight later, we were
back at Djibuti. The s.s. Akbar had still not come in, so I had to join
the Hans Menzel, chartered at Hamburg, as what in maritime terms is
known as supercargo.

Heavens, what an old tub that was ! I was sure that that voyage must
have been the very last before she broke up of her own volition. The
bunkers caught fire no less than three times on that round-Africa
trip. There was always a smell of burning and something smouldering
about her, and as the deck was piled with straw, hay and other fodder,
as well as quantities of spirit and styrax (which we used against scab),
I was always fearing the worst. Below decks the heat was unbelievable.
The combination of equatorial heat, bunker fires and the accumulated
warmth of the crowded transport of dromedaries, produced a tem-
perature which glued one's shirt to one's back. It was a glad moment
every time I was at last able to clamber up, through the open hatch,
away from it. If I had needed any additional proof of what a dromedary
can stand, it was to hand now. They had been trained by centuries to
hard conditions and chronic thirst.

Week after week we steamed along the coast of East Africa. We had
a run through the streets of Mozambique, and we put in at Durban
(or Port Natal) to take in fresh water and to bunker. Our captain put
on his best Sunday suit and a bowler hat and showed me round the
town. There were Zulu-Kaffirs waiting for us on the quay with their
rickshas, a wonderful sight, for on their heads they wore the tre-
mendous horns of antelopes or buffaloes, fantastically polished in
radiating black and white lines, for which they use brushes made of
porcupine quills. The strange, savage head-dress is further set off by
lion or leopard skins draped over the men's shoulders.

There was a fierce crescendo of cries from the Zulu boys as they
invited us to take a ride round their city. Into their rickshas we
climbed, and off we went at a remarkable pace, our black human
steeds making enormous strides, for, as the seating in their little
vehicles was well behind the axle, at every leap he took the man on the
long shafts was raised into the air, and thus carried forward some
distance, before his weight counterbalanced and his feet could touch
the ground again for another flying impulse to be given to the whole

SOUTH-WEST WITH TWO THOUSAND DROMEDARIES

combination. We simply flew along, cutting corners terribly sharply,
and soon I saw my captain sprawling on the kerbstones. I hurried to his
aid, but he was not hurt, only swearing so effectively that both our
Zulus took to hasty flight.

The eighty Arab dromedary men whom we had taken on board at
Berbera were under the command of Matthias Walter. Walter was
one of those small, wiry fellows. The Stellingen folk had christened
him Jack-in- the-Box, not only because it suited him, but also because
his favourite expression was to say something was as broad as it was
long,* and in German that suggested the punning nickname. He had
formerly been at sea.

Rounding the Cape of Good Hope, we ran into a storm and then
Walter had a very narrow squeak. He was nearly swept overboard.
We had been struggling day and night at about two knots an hour
under full steam against high wind and heavy seas, when the tarpaulin
which protected the dromedary stalls was torn away. Up to his waist
in the seas breaking over the deck, Walter fought his way forward to
get at them when a high wave broke over the Hans Menzel, tearing the
ship's bell from its lashings and sending it crashing against the bridge.
When the ship lifted her nose again out of the foaming waters there
was nobody to be seen. Only after anxious moments did we discover
what had happened to Walter he had been thrown twenty yards
back, midships, happily unhurt, but buried under the ruins of the
dromedary stalls, which had now completely collapsed. One of the
animals had its neck broken, another had been swept over a barrier
and strangled by its own halter. But, to balance this loss of two animals,
by the time that, after thirty-seven days' voyage, we anchored off
Liideritz Bay, seven new dromedaries, mostly born in the Indian
Ocean, had seen the light of day.

Liideritz Bay was inhabited by great quantities of penguins, but I
had no time to catch any, for our orders were to continue without
delay to Swakopmund. Before we left on this last stage of our journey,
Fritz Schipfman came on board. He had had charge of twenty-seven
dromedaries of the previous consignment, which had been rejected
by the Defence Force recruiting commission as obviously ailing, but
under his care the animals had clearly got over their indispositions and
were in fine form.

Three days later our anchor once again rattled through the hawse-

* In German : 'dochjacke wie Hose' 'as much jacket as trews', i.e. 'as broad as it's long'
the German expression was turned into Hamburg dialect Jack un Biix. Translator.

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

hole and we were at Swakopmund. The unloading was an interesting
operation, as there was no quay, and heavy Atlantic breakers were
constantly breaking on the shelving beach. The animals were lowered
on to a pontoon attached by a hawser to a windlass on shore, and every
time this rose on the crest of a breaker a few feet of hawser were
swiftly hauled in by a team of soldiers, till at last the thing grounded
firmly on the sandy beach.

By now, no doubt both through the food we were getting and
climatic changes, Schipfman, Wache (another assistant), Walter and I
were all down with a sharp attack of dysentery. As the only regular
convenience in the little inn where we put up (dignified by the title
* hotel' !) happened to be at the bottom of the backyard, for some time
the whole of the great firm of Hagenbeck, Section South- West Africa,
kept to its rooms, seated on so many enamel receptacles. Matthias
Walter was the most seriously affected, but found our situation so
funny that in spite of severe pain he went into hysterics of laughter
every time the gripes began. However, I came to the conclusion that
he was in rather a dangerous condition, so as a Wormann steamer was
just leaving for Hamburg I dispatched him straight back home. As we
knew no ship would willingly accept a passenger suffering from that
particular complaint, we resorted to a ruse, and in the guise of a tipsy
man found we had no difficulty whatsoever in getting Walter on board.
Once there, he soon retired to the ship's sick-bay and spent the whole
voyage there. It was not for some time after his return to Germany that
he really recovered. But by means of horse doses of castor oil, helped
down by quantities of mulled red wine and tots of neat rum, the rest of
us were able to rise again from our enamel thrones and get about.

In all we transported two thousand dromedaries, including first-
class riding animals, to German South- West Africa, and the Defence
Force lost no time in going into training with them. With the con-
signment, we supplied 7,000 worth of saddles, made after the native
pattern by Hamburg saddlers. Just to give an idea of the tremendous
cost of all this, let me mention that our cable bill alone amounted to
2,000 I say nothing of the huge charges for chartering five whole
transport ships.

Introducing the dromedary into South- West Africa, Father was
convinced he had achieved something momentous in cultural history.
Later it was to be seen how mistaken he was. But at that time I think
there was nobody who realised that the little boneshakers which were
beginning to trundle the roads of Europe on veterinary surgeon

SOUTH-WEST WITH TWO THOUSAND DROMEDARIES

Dunlop's pneumatic rubber tyres the first automobiles in other
words were the real epoch-makers in that sphere, destined to
eliminate both the horse in Europe and the dromedary in South
Africa.

Stellingen was now like an ant-heap. In the animal-park-to-be our
foundling working elephants jostled one another, hauling the huge
drays, specially built for them, containing up to five thousand cubic
yards of earth all dug out, by the way, and loaded by hand. Hirsch,
the landscape gardener, had undertaken to transform waste ground
into a park landscape. The only trees growing there at the time were
the three oaks near what was to become our Japanese Island. The plot
was all pasture, except for some acres of potatoes. Today over sixty
different species of trees and shrubs grow there, giving all-the-year-
round life to the park. Valuable bronze statuary, Japanese vases higher
than a man, have found their place harmoniously amid the East Asian
flora of the Japanese Island garden.

Here among other trees were planted some specimens of the rare
gingko, or maidenhair tree, with its lovely golden autumn hues. Hold
one of the peculiarly shaped leaves of this tree against the light and you
have its secret revealed, for each leaf consists of many fine needles
which, close packed, have grown together. The gingko is a half-way
species between needle-bearing and leaf-bearing trees, a primitive
form of growth, first discovered by a German botanist in Japan in
1690. It was none other than Goethe who was responsible for planting
the first tree of the kind in Germany. It stands in the Prince's Park in
Jena. Gingkos flourished in the days of the great saurians, before man
existed at all.

Speaking of saurians, I recall that it was our sculptor, Joseph
Pallenberg, who showed the Hamburg stonemasons the awesome form
of the various monsters which existed millions of years ago. Under his
tuition, they reproduced in stone the pterodactyl and other amphibian
monsters, creating them life size in our Stellingen Animal Park. Father
sent the Dusseldorf sculptor to the natural history museums of Ger-
many and America, and then, basing himself on skeletal finds and the
latest palaeontological advice, Pallenberg built up the largest of all
dinosaurians the diplodocus, which was about seventy feet long.

He was a very jolly fellow, was that good Rhinelander, and as he
never let his pipe go out while working he was popularly known as
Jupp mit de Piep, or Pipe Joe. His studio at Lohausen was more like a

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

natural history museum, and his live models were a private zoo in
themselves. He was a first-class sculptor and an animal friend too,
always able to realise in three dimensions whatever Wilhelm Kuhnert
produced in sketchbook or on the easel. When, arriving home from
Africa, I drove in under the scaffolding of our main entrance, Pallen-
berg's animals were just being unpacked, and to this day they still
offer sightseers life-size reproductions of the animal world of the
Arctic and the Tropics. Thus were artists, engineers, gardeners and
navvies, all under Heinrich's general direction, realising Father's life's
dream, and there was work enough for everybody.

However, my own circus enterprise soon called me back to North
America. Lee Williams telegraphed: 'Come immediately, meet at
Chicago.' But when I arrived it was to find a message from him to say
that he would be three days late. That was bad, since I had brought no
spare cash with me. I could, of course, pay my hotel bill later, but I
did not want to owe the accommodating head waiter for my meals. As
I did not want to bother any of our American acquaintances for a loan,
I wandered in very ill humour about the streets, puzzling out how I
was to exist for three days more on my very last dollar. I paused outside
a twenty-five-cent bar.

'Hallo there, Lawrence, how are you?' cried a waiter who obligingly
stood in the doorway.

I was defeated. 'How do you know me?' I asked.

'Jesus Christ,' he cried, 'didn't I serve you day in, day out, at the
Outside Inn, during the St. Louis World Exhibition? Surely you
haven't forgotten how my boss took refuge in the fireplace?'

Only then it dawned on me who he was, and as he seemed so
friendly I plucked up courage and sponged on him. He at once lent
me ten dollars, and so, till Lee Williams turned up, I was well away.*

What a reunion that was at the circus ! Ringling was so excited that
he actually swallowed his tobacco quid, though the accident still left
him enough spittle to send copious streams in all directions to show his
delight. And there was John Sheehy, six-shooter in place in coat
pocket, beaming with pleasure. And Tiger, our four-footed cash-
guard, leaping all over me, barking and whining with delight. And
Prince whinnying. They were all jolly glad to see me, and my boy-
hood friends, Charly and Reuben, laid on a festive feast in the circus
dining tent. I must admit that when, somewhat later, I stretched out
again in my home on wheels, I was very content to be back on the

* Prices were of course different this was half a century ago. Translator.

SOUTH-WEST WITH TWO THOUSAND DROMEDARIES

circus round again. And once again the wheels hammered out their
rhythm of the road as they clicked over the rail joints.

The following day, however, was not so pleasant. Running through
the books, I found that Lee Williams had made changes to which I
had never given my consent, and as a result had bumped up our daily
outgoings for the three-ring circus by a cool thousand dollars. That
was too much for so young an enterprise, and I told him at once that
we were bound to lose money.

One morning we were again on one of those drives to the bank
when there was a telegram from Stellingen good news from Hein-
rich ; he announced the birth of his third daughter.

'Now, that sure smells like champagne,' growled John Sheehy, when
we had dropped in to a pub to celebrate on a * Ginger-ale high-ball.'
The bartender wished us good business and brought out another
bottle. When we got to our wagon I ventured a little speech. In fact,
I must say that we were really very merry indeed that day and every-
body we came upon had to drink a glass to the health of the new-born
squaller. I remember that somebody had lit a bonfire to clean up
packing straw and paper decorations. And as in America it was cus-
tomary to stop wearing straw hats dead on the stroke of September ist,
I suddenly tore Reuben's old boater from his head and threw that too
on the flames. For a moment he was hopping mad, then he laughed it
away. A moment later he vanished, to reappear with a marvellous
new panama on his head. Naturally when I wanted to get that one off
too he put up a defence, but when at last I had bested him and put
that thing too on the fire he laughed till I thought his sides would split.
Only then did I discover that I had just burned my own precious new
hat, which Reuben had kindly fetched from the truck. The score
was now i-i, and, as Reuben said, my conscience could be clear!

For most towns we were a new event. When I went to the local
police for our permit, I would often be sternly asked what sort of
card-sharping we dealt in. It was with both great firmness and great
hope that usually I answered that in our outfit all card-sharping was
forbidden ; if anybody were caught gambling on our ground he would
be handed over to the police forthwith. Usually these assurances of
mine were met with a cynical laugh, and the threat of the lock-up
for us all if anyone among us were found indulging in gambling.

I was still rather a greenhorn, you see, but I pretty soon learned the
way the wind blew in America. It was on that occasion when I tried
to sell old Ben Wallace a dozen performing elephants. If ever there

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

was a dyed-in-the-wool American showman it was Wallace. 'Ele-
phants?' he cried. 'You get to hell with them animals 1 They'd eat
the hair right off my head and cost a fortune. If ever I want to earn
some dollars, I think up a new game.'

To understand Wallace, I needed no dictionary, but I did take a
good look at the way he got the dollars out of people's pockets.
Crowds would flock in their thousands round a stage, on which was a
man selling lottery tickets, and all would be astonished to see that
people were actually winning here five, there ten, even twenty
dollars. Indeed, at first there was hardly anybody round who did not
win something. Of course, the winners were almost all stooges of the
man on the platform. Nor did these runners-up stint their praises of
the system, and I can still recall an old farmer who brought out one
ten-dollar note after another and gambled them all away. When the
old fool fell out of the running, the worthy and enterprising gentleman
on the platform had already relieved him of a hundred dollars. While
this kind of circus work was still unknown in Germany, there were at
the turn of the century many men in America making their fortunes
at it.

Later, when our circus seemed to have ceased to be at all profitable,
and I at last returned to Germany, our American partners joined up
with this very showman, Ben Wallace. Father had tried to sell the
circus to the Ringling brothers, but by himself he was unable to per-
suade the Ringlings to buy, so it came first to what was advertised as
the 'joint' Hagenbeck- Wallace Show. We protested against our name
being exploited in this way, and gave Charles Ringling full powers to
do what he could to rescue it, but after Father's death during the first
world war and the inflation which followed the ensuing peace, we
simply had not the money to go to law about it. Thus it was that in
the twenties, until at last it was sold to the Ringlings, there was a
circus going round America calling itself the Hagenbeck- Wallace
Circus.

PATENT NO. 91,492 BECOMES REALITY

MAY 7TH, 1907, was a red-letter day in the Hagenbeck family, for that
afternoon the Stellingen Animal Park opened its gates. Patent No.
91,492 issued to my father in 1896 had materialised. Father's great
dream was fulfilled. At the formal opening, the director of the
Copenhagen Zoo raised his glass and made a most amusing speech,
addressing my parents as 'the Adam and Eve of an animal paradise on
the hanks of the Elbe.'

Among the exotic guests was Hersy Egeh, punctual as ever in his
arrival at Hamburg, and complete with favourite sons and daughters.
Hersy was in full war-paint, and we noticed that the family was in-
creasing in great strides as the years went by. The loveliest of his
marriageable daughters was Kadidja.

'You take her,' said Hersy to me, offering her dusky hand. The lass
was certainly gleaming with health, but also with mutton fat, for this
was what in Somali fashion she used for dressing her ebony hair.

I thanked Hersy punctiliously, but declined the opportunity. Even
though unannounced, I had, indeed, already made my choice. But I
expressed my hope that in her own land Kadidja might find a happy
match, perhaps of more suitable colour than myself.

In Stellingen's opening year the gates exceeded all expectations.
The crowds used to pour through the park in their thousands. It was
then only half its later size. But Father counted on still higher attend-
ances and pressed for extensions as soon as feasible. He was also a little
worried, and not without good reason, lest the further development of
our animal park were hindered by the building of large industrial
plant next to us. hi order not to be squeezed into a narrow wedge of
space between blocks of flats and factories, he quickly bought up
with the help of friends and the banks sites all round the park. Tene-
ment blocks even at that early date had already spread out almost to
the city boundaries. (Stellingen, of course, was outside what was
strictly Hamburg territory.)

I remember once, when I was setting out for America, my mother
suddenly enjoining me not to bring her home an American daughter-
in-law. 'She won't be able to cook,' she said. She already had no need

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

PATENTURKUNDE

UP GRUND DER ANGEHEFTETEN PATENTSCHRIFT 1ST DURCH BESCHLUSS
DBS KA1SERLICHEN PATENTAMTES

BIN PATENT ERTHEILT WORDEN.
CEGENSTAND DES PATENTED 1ST:

ANFANO DES PATENTES: /t

DIE RBCHTE UNO PFLICHTEN DES PATENTINHABERS S1ND DURCH DAS PATENT-
OESETZ.VOM J.APRIL 1891 (UnCHS-OMETMUTT FOR UN SEtTI* BESTIMMT.

ZU URKUND DER ERTHEILDNO DES PATENTES 1ST DIESE AUSFERT1GUNG
ERFOLGT.

KAISERLICHES PATENTAMT.

to worry. On November 9th, that year, I was able to calm all her fears
on that score. When today I take in my hands that copy of Die Woche,
at that time a most popular weekly magazine, and turn the pages to
the big spread about our wedding, in all its great joy that day comes
back to me on which my darling Else and I together began life's great
pas-de-deux.

During Hamburg's 1908 race week, the Emperor Wilhelm II paid

LATENT NO. 91,492 BECOMES REALITY

a visit to our animal park. Father, Heinrich and I stood in our best
frock-coats and top hats at the main entrance to receive the mon-
arch. All our friends and acquaintances had showered advice on us
how to behave, for it was a long time since we had had so elevated a
visitor. We were on no account to address His Majesty ourselves ; we
were to maintain a respectfully humble but yet dignified bearing ; we
must hold our top hats in our left hands ; we must do this and we must
on no account do that !

It was a little before ten when the four imperial Mercedes motor-
cars with the familiar imperial hooters sounding roared into sight at
high speed. In the first car I recognized the Kaiser, in naval uniform.
For hours already the Veterans Associations of the 1 848-51 and 1870-1
wars had been assembled, complete with standards and brass bands.
The school children all had a holiday and our Altona police had their
hands full to keep the route free from children. On our flagstaff the
national flag of Prussia was topped by the black, white and red flag of
the Reich for of course Stellingen could not forget that it was
Prussian territory. The cheering resounded all the way from Hamburg
to the animal park, and the crowds in the streets and squares were
dense.

'Good morning, comrades!' cried the Kaiser to the war veterans
as he stepped from his car. The Prussian Ambassador, Count von
Gotzen, then presented Father, Heinrich and myself. At once the
Kaiser's beaming goodwill and cordiality eased the stiffness of those
first moments. 'I already know your animal park so well from the
cinematographs, 1 said Wilhelm II, with a laugh, 'but my brother has
told me that I really must have a look at the real thing. '

There followed a pleasant stroll of several hours through the park,
which for the whole of that morning was closed to the public. Every-
where stood our keepers, in gala uniform. It was all rather like a regi-
mental parade, and every man heaved a sigh of relief when the august
visitor uttered his perfunctory words of praise. While Father con-
versed enthusiastically with the Kaiser, my brother and I gave the
Court Marshals, the Generals, the Supreme Stable-masters and other
members of the imperial suite whatever explanations they desired.

In the training hall our leading tamer, Papa Schilling, showed the
Kaiser his big mixed groups of the big carnivores. But it was the Indian
conjurer of the Singhalese company who attracted most attention,

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

and after a strenuous two and a half hours' sightseeing the Kaiser ex-
pressed a wish to have this performer show his skill on board the
Imperial yacht, the Hohenzollern, then lying in the harbour.

The same afternoon, I drove in all my finery out in an elegant coach,
together with our Indian fakir, to the landing-stage dock, where the
Hohenzollern lay. Clearly the officers of the watch thought it was some
oriental potentate come with his ambassador to pay court. The
bosun's pipe shrilled and it was with much pomp that we strode under
the blue ceiling of the landing-bridge, which had been transformed
into a regular arbour by flowers and bunting. The watch presented arms,
and when the officer in command received me I detected a little grin
playing on his face. We agreed that this was probably the first time
that a recruit whose only military service had been three weeks in
the Count Bose Infantry Regiment No. 31 had been accorded such a
reception. On the other hand, had I not brought the wonder of India
to the Royal yacht?

A dazzling company had assembled on the after-deck, among whom
I was amused to recognise the same personalities whom so recently I
had shown over our animal park. The Kaiser himself was in fine form,
and kept asking me what the magician was saying. This was because
our Indian accompanied his tricks with a regular cascade of words. But
I had not the faintest idea what they meant. However, I used my wits
and with my eyes keenly following the fellow's picturesque gestures
I 'translated* away. The conjurer brought the house down when he
asked for a ring, and threw it into the air where it vanished then
pointed to his 'magic bag* and asked the Kaiser to take out any one of
the oranges in it and hand it to him. Demonstrating to everybody
that the peel of the selected orange was untouched, he split it open
with nimble fingers, to reveal the ring stuck in the heart of it. I never
saw the Kaiser more happy than he was at that moment.

A few hours later the Hohenzollern weighed anchor and set course
for Heligoland.

In our animal park this festive day was concluded by our brass band
playing Saro's great 'Battle Potpourri/ which in those days was as a
rule emphasised at the high points by real volleys of rifle fire and
salvoes of cannon. Our polar bears were quite used both to this and
to having their northern panorama lighted by Bengal fire. On the
other hand, the ten elephants, which our Singhalese one night rode
down to the Eidelstedt station, were just as timid as the bears were
brave. The point of the ride to the station was that these elephants

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PATENT NO. 91,492 BECOMES REALITY

were to travel to Munich for the October carnival, where we had
built up a large menagerie and a show of exotic peoples.

It was at Munich that my father once had the scare of his life. This
was in 1888, during some centenary celebrations. His elephants were
to make a triumphal march-past through Odeon Square, near which
runs a railway. A locomotive suddenly let off steam and frightened the
animals. One broke through the wall of a house, though once inside it
stepped carefully over a cradle in which a baby was sleeping. Another
elephant made its way into the Court Brewery, and is to this day
considered the most remarkable of the visitors ever to go there. We
had much the same mishap on the night that this particular group of
elephants were to go to Munich. A shunting engine with gleaming
head lanterns suddenly came rattling and hissing along near by, and
the elephants took fright. They just seemed all at once to leave the
ground without a sound, and before the Indian mahouts had picked
themselves up off the ground where they were pitched, the whole
herd had stampeded and was tearing through the suburbs of Stellingen,
Eidelstedt and Lokstedt. The adventures of that night are still fireside
talk.

There was, for instance, the gentleman who came home rather late
and was fumbling for the keyhole when he seemed to see an elephant
peep round the corner of his house. That shook him badly, but he
tried not to be scared, and told himself that he was not really quite so
pickled. Besides, one saw white mice, did one not, when one had
D.T.s, and he was hardly going to believe that even if he were in
such a condition he would see elephants. To make quite sure, he
crept quietly round the house to see the same elephant, back view,
scratching its brawny shoulder cosily on the corner of the wall.
That did awaken the homecomer. He scrambled up the balcony
railing, rang my father up and when at last he got through said
meekly. 'Mr Hagenbeck, if you've lost an elephant, it's in my front
garden.'

Father of course still knew nothing, so he concluded that this was
a practical joker and banged the receiver down very angrily. It was
only when later he saw all the lights were on in the park and the
police began to rally all our elephant keepers that he realised that his
night call had been quite genuine !

However, by early morning it proved possible to tether most of
the truants to trees, though a female which we called Ceylon was not
located till the following afternoon. She was deep in the woods out

6 AML

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

at Pinneberg, and had to be led home by our Stellingen working
elephant Roma.

One good burgher's summer-house was destroyed during that
night's gallivanting, but fortunately the field damage at which
elephants are most expert was very slight and soon settled with
moderate sums in ready cash plus free tickets. When we reviewed the
whole event, we found that the person who was apparently least
disturbed of all was a certain little old lady out in her garden. When
she saw an elephant coming her way she quickly bolted her rickety
little wicket-gate, and ran up to it with her open umbrella. 'No, no,'
she cried, 'don't you come into my garden, or I'll give you what for!'
Whether the elephant was really frightened, or just had a sense of
humour, I cannot say, but the fact is that it did come to a dead stop
at her feeble little gate and did not even try to get into the tempting
garden.

Every spring my parents went to the French Riviera for several
weeks' holiday. They generally chose Nice, and there my father made
the acquaintance of the young American John Millen. Being, like
every good Yankee, a keen business man, Millen was running an
ostrich farm in the South of France, for at the time there was a great
fashion for what were called pleureuses and boas, both of which articles
of feminine adornment required ostrich feathers. The Mediterranean
climate suited both farmer and stock, so it was easy for Millen to
produce magnificent specimens of the feathers with which the ladies
on the fashionable promenades of Nice decorated their cart-wheel
hats. This struck my father forcibly and he told himself that he might
do the same, which with his temperament was equivalent to getting
it done. Without hesitation he engaged John Mill en's services, and
thus Germany acquired its first ostrich farm at Stellingen. The
moment Father had got it started, in came the breeding stock blue-
legged varieties from Somaliland and giant red-necked birds from
West Africa, and these selected breeding specimens were crossed.

To hatch out the eggs, which the ostrich buries lightly in sand, the
modern incubator was substituted for the burning sunshine of Africa,
maintaining a temperature of 113 F., and in about forty-one days
ostrich chicks hatched out. Devising a foster-mother was not so easy.
John Millen had to turn the eggs every day and twice a week expose
them for a time to fresh air and wash them over with lukewarm water.

Ostrich eggs on the average equal from twenty-six to twenty-eight
ordinary domestic fowls' eggs, but the biggest I ever handled equalled

PATENT NO. 91,49* BECOMES REALITY

thirty-six ordinary eggs. It was double-yolked, and from it a great
rarity hatched two healthy chicks. Unfortunately, however, they
shared their navel string. Painstakingly, they were separated, but they
lived only a few days.

The young ostriches followed their foster-father Millen every-
where. At first he fed them with fresh ostrich eggs, then passed over
to chopped lucerne and finally to shredded meat to serve as sub-
stitute for the insects on which ostriches feed in their native land.
The little ostriches hatched out as spiny as hedgehogs. In their third
year the cock birds acquired their black feathering, with fine tufts
of white plumage, but the hen birds remained grey all over. Our
Hamburg air induced a remarkably thick feathering, so that when
eventually we supplied Stellingen ostrich cock birds to South African
farms for breeding purposes the farmers were most grateful.

On June 2ist, 1909, this pioneer German ostrich farm was opened
by the Empress. Adjacent, we had our own workshops, where women
workers goffered pleureuses for the market, till Queen Fashion de-
throned that particular form of feminine decoration and all the
ostrich farmers of the world had to think up something else to do.

I have, I think, rarely known a more stupid creature than the
ostrich. Not, of course, that he really does stick his head in the sand,
as our comic papers would have us believe, for when they are frighten-
ed they just flap their wings excitedly and run, with enormous strides,
zigzagging away from what has scared them. But I have seen something
which I find even more stupid, and that is an ostrich which, having
stuck its head between the bars of its cage, just had not the sense to
see how to get it out again. Having far more power in its legs than its
brain, it had not tried any manoeuvring, but just pulled till its
head came right off. We found it decapitated, body inside, head lying
on the ground outside the cage !

Ostrich gizzards 'stomach' things which no other creature would
stand coins, rings, keys, pencils and pebbles are not, I think, par-
ticularly nutritive, but ostriches readily pick them up and swallow
them. In the gizzard of one newly imported bird we actually found
some copper nails. The points and the heads had already been nearly
eaten away by the digestive juices, which are very strong, and the nails
shone as if polished. Father had one set in a gold tie-pin and gave it to
John Millen as a memento.

THE FIRST SEA-ELEPHANTS COME TO GERMANY

IN AUGUST 1909 it was once again 'pack your bags! 1 Dr. Schneider-
mann, head of the Argentine State Railways, had written to my father
and asked him if he could take to Buenos Aires a zoological circus like
that which had been sent to St. Louis. It was wanted as part of the
centenary celebrations of the foundation of the republic. There was
at the same time to be a Railway Exhibition and an Agricultural Show
and the Argentinians guaranteed a good gate for our circus. The agri-
cultural show particularly interested us, for, in addition to our own
circus, we undertook to transport to the Argentine the animals which
were going to be exhibited by the Agricultural Society of Germany.

So off we went to Buenos Aires ! One conference followed the
other. The exhibition ground was on the outskirts of Palermo, which
is a rich residential suburb of Buenos Aires, to which good roads,
however, had still to be constructed. But the city authorities guaran-
teed that this would be achieved in time and that there would be a
water supply.

I had, however, scarcely completed my fourth day in the 'city of
good air* when there was Father telegraphing to me to come back.
Decisions were not coming through quickly enough for the old boy !
Father had never heard of that period of time known as manana. If we
were going to get ready at our usual speed, there was nothing for it
but immediately to take out workers and carpenters from Hamburg.

I returned home and went to see the large Stromeyer tent-making
concern at Konstanz. From them I ordered a free-hanging marquee
two hundred and forty feet by one hundred and five feet. I also put in
hand an imposing facade for the circus main entrance to this. While
Father and Heinrich began getting together the show animals and the
performing animals I set sail back again on the Cap Arcona for Buenos
Aires, this time taking my wife and eighteen-month-old son Carl
Lorenz with me. This was my first big journey en famille, and whereas
previously I had had to see that my elephants did not get constipated
and my dromedaries did not get the scab, now I had other cares not so
very different. Carlo, as we called him, bawled his head off, my better
half went down chronically seasick, and our maid Paula was soon

THE FIRST SEA-ELEPHANTS COME TO GERMANY

keeping her company. Hence it was I who traipsed between galley
and cabin with baby's bottle, in an effort at least by nigh^ to placate
him.

Paula, however, was fairly soon on her feet again. But now the sea
air gave her a remarkable appetite, and before we reached Buenos
Aires our luck ran out again, for the girl began to complain of cramp
in her limbs. At last Else got her to bed as preparation for calling in
the doctor, only, surprisingly, to find that no doctor was necessary
for the diagnosis. Paula had simply got so fat that her underclothes
worn rather voluminously in those days were hindering her circula-
tion, for in three weeks the girl had put on thirty-six pounds in
flesh! When certain mysterious operations with scissors and needle
and cotton had been effected, Paula's crippling cramp rapidly dis-
appeared. Indeed, she now slept so soundly that no baby could have
bawled loudly enough to waken her, and when on one occasion she fell
out of her bunk, which was an upper one, it was to be found the next
morning still sound asleep on her bedding on the floor. I myself did
not enjoy such peace, for hot on my heels, only a fortnight away, was
a steamer conveying an army of carpenters and building material. My
contract specified that the show must be ready by the end of April.

What made the sensation in Buenos Aires was our collection of
carnivorous animals without cages. To show our fierce pets as we
wished, deep moats still had to be dug and concreted. When I re-
joined the family at the Plaza Hotel in Buenos Aires, after my first
trip out to Palermo, I had the depressing conviction that by the time
we had completed all that constructional work the whole exhibition
would be over. However, in the end the only thing which was ready
was our Exposition Carlos Hagenbeck, and that on the dot too. And just
as keenly on time the Santa Elena came with our animal tamers and
their animals, men and beasts alike already world famous. There,
leaning over the ship's rail, waving, was Richard Sawade, a true
gentleman of the central cage the man from whose sleigh an en-
thusiastic Russian audience had once unharnessed the horses, to draw
it to his hotel by hand together with all the presents the Tsar and the
Grand Dukes had showered on him.

Sawade, a school-teacher's son from Drossen, had with him that
celebrated lion-producer Claire Heliot, an outstanding animal tamer
of the day, a man who for generations ahead set an example of how to
do it. Further, there were Fritz Schilling with his twenty polar bears,
Corradini the Italian with his elephants; there were zebras, horses

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

and dogs, while Captain Nansen's sea-lions were bellowing excitedly
in their tank-wagon and Hans Schroder's chimpanzees were doing a
little advance practice work on deck on their bicycles.

Our band of eighteen instruments now took up stations forward and
struck up the Argentinian national anthem. But as it took rather
longer than they anticipated to bring the steamer properly up to the
quay, the conductor played far more verses than the anthem envisages.
This had rather an unfortunate result, for it was the South Americans'
custom always to listen to their anthem bareheaded, and the crowds
began to get irritated at having to suffer so much sunshine on their
bare heads. A mutter of complaint arose, but the band was making
such a din that our good bandmaster took absolutely no notice of my
shouting. I was in the end compelled to throw something at him to
attract his attention. I succeeded at last with a banana!

While our carpenters, decorators, electricians and tent makers
were erecting our buildings and tents, I was frequently the guest of my
good friend Dr. Clemente Onelli, of the Buenos Aires Zoo. For, if I
may put it like that, animal handlers the wide world over have a
language in common, the language of the heart. It was, incidentally, in
Onelli 's zoo that my marriage suffered its first serious contretemps.
Carlo had just begun to toddle, and of course he wanted to feed the
monkeys with a packet of 'bikkies.' In the particular cage which he
chose there was a big family of capuchin monkeys bounding about, and
I knew what vicious little beasts they can be. So I said: No! But
Mamma said: Yes! 'Do let him have his little amusement,' insisted
my good Else. And so it went on : No ! Yes ! No ! Yes ! when sud-
denly Carlo, taking proper advantage of this parental dispute, went up
to the cage and held out his hand. Then the fun began. With his little
hands already nastily scratched, I got him away just in time, or the
savage little creatures would certainly have pulled them through into
the cage and bitten them, to get him to open that tight little fist in
which he held those biscuits.

I tell this story because unfortunately I still often see parents at our
animal park lift their children up over the fence to 'shake hands with
the monkeys. 1 These delightful monkeys may equally well be baboons
or orang-utans or chimpanzees, by whom one of our keepers was once
so badly mauled that he had to have his arm amputated.

But of course I did not pay visits to the Buenos Aires Zoo to squabble
with my wife in the monkey-house, but because it had zoological
rarities, in the shape of sea-elephants and penguins, which for a long

THE FIRST SEA-ELEPHANTS COME TO GERMANY

time had not been seen in any German zoo. When these particu-
lar animals were brought to Buenos Aires, I had gone on board the
steamer with Onelli and met the Norwegian captain who had caught
them, and arranged with him that when he made his next voyage out
he should take one of our animal trappers with him.

It was many years before this that over a cup of coffee at our Stellin-
gen home the captain of the Valdivia expedition had told my father
about these mighty seals. I had at the time got quite excited about the
idea of acquiring some of those unknown animals for our animal park.
I remember father squinting at me over his spectacles and saying:
'That will never be more than a dream, while I am alive.'

Now at last the realisation of the dream was at hand. I sent Johannes
Pallenberg, a brother of the Diisseldorf sculptor, to the Antarctic,
and here is an extract from his story.

'Our steamer loaded provisions and coal for a Norwegian
whaling outpost, which we reached after nine days' voyage south.
Enormous icebergs, a terrible stink and vast flights of Cape pigeons
and seagulls soon indicated our goal, where at this time of the year
one hundred and forty Norwegians were reducing a thousand
whales to thirty-five thousand barrels of whale-oil. They also had
a permit to slaughter sea-elephants five thousand bulls a season.

'It made my heart bleed to have to behold that mass slaughter of
animals which would have enriched any zoo in the world. From afar
off I could distinguish the huge bodies of these powerful long-
muzzled seals, which lay asleep there on the shore like rocks worn
smooth by the waves. Not one of them took the least notice of us,
and only rarely when one came close to one of the old bulls would
it rear up, puff out its balloon-like snout and begin a primitive
bellowing. Each of these old pashas, which were often fifteen to
twenty or more feet long, lay surrounded by his harem of thirty or
forty wives, some of which had recently calved young ones, which
were almost entirely black.

'Without delay the slaughterers began their butchery. Incessantly
now the shots aimed at the neck rent the air, otherwise filled
with the roar of the breakers, the harsh cries of sea-birds and the
bellowing of the sea-elephants. The slaughtered bulls were stripped
of their meat without delay. I wandered farther, and soon found
myself in the heart of a huge colony of penguins, in which the
magnificent large king penguins were the most striking. It was no

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

great art to catch these. One only needed a stout glove, for they
could give you a nasty nip, and a bag in which to take them home.
'A net was now cast over three young sea-elephants and dragged
by a couple of men over the shingle and into the boat, a task not
made at all easy by the heavy breakers. We took it in turns, stand-
ing in the ice-cold water, and one boat was completely wrecked. '

Meantime the Cap Arcona, the proud flagship of the Hamburg-
South America line, had been back home again and now brought
Father and Mother out to Buenos Aires. Between decks travelled
Hersy Egeh's curly-headed tribe, and with him were his movable
belongings from Somaliland. I went on board to meet my parents. My
mother was very happy indeed, for this was the very first time she
had been able to make a big Atlantic voyage with my father and,
incidentally, crossing the line met Neptune, his astronomers and his
barber. With pride she showed me her equatorial baptismal birth
certificate, on which the gallant Lord of the Seas had christened our
dear mother 'Sea-rose.'

Father was delighted to find all the work so well advanced, and
both were very pleased to be able to dandle their first male grandson
on their knees again. However, such idyllic domestic matters did not
detain Father long. He was far too restless a spirit for that, and as he
had already had three weeks of inactivity on the crossing, he was
fidgety to get at something. He now spent all his time out at the
exhibition ground, and if only he had been able to have a say in matters
outside our border-line, he would have transformed the whole of
that lackadaisically progressing work into an ant-heap of furious
activity.

Mother, who did not know a single word of Spanish, was soon as
practised as the most finished telephone operator, for she had con-
stantly to be on the spot, handling telegrams and even conversations.
It was never at all clear to me how she contrived to do this, but she
was a determined woman, was my mother, and anyway she already
had a lifetime behind her of marriage to my father !

One day, Father dictated to Mother a cable to Uncle John in
Colombo. To improve our show, Uncle John was at once to send us
twenty devil dancers. But those Udacki dancers, who with their devil
masks had worked wonders in North America and Europe, were
never going to cut much ice here, for being themselves a mixture of

THE FIRST SEA-ELEPHANTS COME TO GERMANY

all shades of colour from pitch-black to white coffee-colour in Buenos
Aires, the South Americans were not impressed by exotic peoples.
Our Somalis were quite sufficient for those who did like such shows.
So with Mother's consent, I held that telegram up, and when later
Father asked when we could expect the party from Ceylon we ex-
plained the position to him. I thought he would have had a stroke. He
simply exploded with fury and thundered at me that it was the duty of
a son to obey his father. 'You do what you want/ he yelled, 'but
what I want to have done shall be done. 1

However, the old boy was not to grumble longer than to his sixty-
sixth birthday, celebrated out there, for on that occasion I presented
him with something which he never dreamed he would have, and
which afforded him such delight that tears trickled down his cheeks.
He held my hand, and all his smouldering anger with the disobedient
son vanished, for before his eyes were trumpeting seventy penguins,
of all species, from proud king penguins with yellow chops to the
small spectacle penguins, while just beneath them, the greatest birth-
day surprise of all, were three priceless sea-elephants !

Father celebrated his birthday together with the whole of our staff
in the huge canteen hut behind the circus. My parents presided at a
laden table, and the large elephant which the Italian Corradini had
trained was to present Father with a bouquet. Jumbo did so, with an
additional attraction which had not been planned for. For the gang-
way down which he had to pass was rather narrow. Moreover, on the
way he passed the kitchen and a serving hatch, in front of which, on
the canteen side, was a broad shelf. To Jumbo this seemed one of the
best back-scratching appliances he had ever struck, so while with all
his best grace he reached his trunk over the table and presented the
flowers, he heaved his voluminous hindquarters up against the hatch,
manoeuvred his tail neatly through this into the freer space of the
kitchen, and with deep, contented grunts proceeded to scratch his
carcase, and so engrossed did he get in the enjoyment of this that he
became quite rhythmic in his movements, until the whole building
was quivering perilously with the music. I do not think I have
ever seen Mother or Father laugh so heartily before, and indeed
we all laughed together with them, laughed till the walls literally
shook.

The other noteworthy point of the party was the pikce de resistance
roast hare ! For there were two friendly estancieros, as they call farmers
in the Argentine, who had asked me to go shooting with them. And

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

I would gladly have gone, had I had time, but had been compelled to
decline. Then let us send you round a couple of hares/ they said, and
I accepted the kind offer, without thinking that the wag was going to
send me a consignment of no less than two hundred and fifty hares,
neatly ranged on poles, filling a whole large lorry. We all, every man
jack in Hagenbeck's employ, ate hare all day long, till even the most
long-suffering ran up the flag and capitulated. We fed the remainder
to the animals.

I had had our carpenters make huge boxes, like those we used for
our sea-lions, for the oversea transport of the sea-elephants. They
could sun themselves on a platform inside, or spend all day in fresh
sea-water in a pool on the ground floor. We were still without the
necessary experience as to food for them, but it so happens that I had
noticed young live eels about as long as one's finger on sale in the
Vigo fish market. So I tried these and was delighted afterwards to hear
from Father that our sea-elephants loved them. Thus in 1910 the
first sea-elephants to be shown alive in Europe travelled back to
Hamburg as the personal suite of my dear old father.

The atmosphere of Buenos Aires was now charged with political
storms. In any case, revolutions are endemic in South American
politics, and need never be taken very seriously. In those days it often
thundered, and there were also often strikes. One incidental conse-
quence of this disturbed climate was that the Buenos Aires Inter-
national Exhibition was really not officially opened till after Father
had long been back at Stellingen with his sea-elephants and his
penguins !

Now I was to have my surprise. When we had had the fuss about
that Colombo telegram, my father had not mentioned the matter
again. But what he had done was to find ways and means both of
getting his own way and of respecting my misgivings. So, to my horror,
there suddenly arrived, not twenty devil dancers, but ten of them !
And just as I was fetching them from the ship a messenger ran up to
me with the terrible news that the monkey-houses were on fire !

This exhibition was partly a show attached to the circus, partly a
museum. There were skeletons of the anthropoid apes in glass show-
cases. There was a giant gorilla a good seven and a half feet high with
menacingly gaping jaws, escaping into the virgin jungle with a shriek-
ing black woman under its arm ! Of course, the man who stuffed that
gorilla was really doing the animal a great injustice. An exhibit like
that might do in an amusement park, but it was not suitable for a

THE FIRST SEA-ELEPHANTS COME TO GERMANY

museum. But now with the heat of the fire the glass broke and the
contents of the case were destroyed. It was an ill wind indeed, for
everything was highly insured, so I was not at all sorry to see the
'disaster* clear out items which I did not really like.

Rather glad to have got rid of that particular museum rubbish in
so easy a fashion, I telegraphed to my father. But by return the
irrepressible old dear cabled back to tell me that he was going to
dispatch a replacement gorilla exhibit and also a 'giant snake attrac-
tion.' As the ocean separated us, I summoned sufficient courage on this
occasion to telegraph my stern opposition, for, large snakes being as
common in South America as mice are in Germany, there was no
attraction whatsoever in that item.

A terrible event was soon to be the subject of another cable. In his
big carnivores group Richard Sawade had a young tiger which he had
brought up from infancy. It was called Nik and was his great pet. It
used to go round with him like a big sheep-dog. But one evening none
other than this tiger attacked him and ripped up his shoulder and
upper arm. Fortunately, Sawade was able to grip a bar of the cage
with the other hand, and, being a man of athletic strength beyond the
ordinary, he succeeded in preventing the animal getting at his neck.
His fearless assistant, Rudolf Matthies, came running up and as close
as possible fired blank cartridges into the tiger's jaws, and the wooden
cap of the cartridge, at that short range, hit the animal. Indeed, some
splinters also wounded Sawade in the back, but the necessary result
was achieved the tiger at once began to gnaw at its own wounds, and
with his wooden pole Matthies could drive the animal away.

We all held our breath. Slowly, Sawade loosened his hold on the bar.
Everybody expected him to fall. But, his face contorted with pain,
he now went back into the ring, drove all his animals out of the
central cage, bowed rather curtly, and only then, streaming with
blood, collapsed in the paddock.

Thank Heaven, medical aid was immediately at hand. The surgeons
of the German hospital saved his life. For weeks he lay, terribly hurt,
struggling against the blood poisoning which is so frequently a com-
plication of carnivorous animal wounds. A lung inflammation hindered
the recovery, which this brave man later general manager of our
travelling circus owed solely to iron will and an iron constitution.

A carnivorous animal always remains a carnivorous animal. Whether
caught fully grown or brought up from infancy on the bottle makes no
difference whatsoever. Gratitude and faithfulness are virtues in our

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

human ambit of emotions, and not to be imagined unconditionally into
animals, which are in the power of other instincts.

After this accident, Rudolf Matthies took over Sawade's animal
group, from which of course I removed the attacker. Matthies not
only did his outstanding teacher every honour, but himself became a
first-class tiger trainer, the only one, indeed, later to be awarded the
German Animal Protection Medal.

TROUBLESOME HERITAGE THE ANIMAL PARK

HEINRICH AND I were to be permitted scarcely three years of collabora-
tion with my father on his Stellingen life's work, for on April i4th,
1913, after months of painful illness, he passed away. To the very end,
however, he kept a firm hand on his great enterprise. When in 1910 I
returned from Buenos Aires, Father was pressing forward with the
work of creating his Stellingen Animal Park at the highest possible
speed. About this time, the famous American inventor, Edison,
brought his whole family to see Stellingen. With the assistance of our
Swiss friend, Urs Eggenschwyler, Heinrich also undertook the con-
struction of a zoo for Rome, and a whole goods train of animals crossed
the Brenner from Stellingen to the Eternal City. Father also went to
the Adriatic to establish a tropical animal acclimatisation station on
the now Yugoslav island of Brioni. At Stellingen there was a constant
coming and going of Eskimos, Indians, Samoyedes, Kikuyus and Masais
to keep the ethnographical exhibition constantly new. Matthias
Walter, at last recovered from the trials of his dromedary expedition,
took a large contingent of animals to the Sultan of Morocco, who had
had a private zoo built, and this too we equipped with animals, all
of which arrived safe and sound. Even the polar bears stood the African
heat. Strange though it may seem, the only casualty was a tiger which
actually went down with heat-stroke !

At Stellingen the sea-elephants were housed in a specially con-
structed Arctic Panorama setting. More and more animal houses and
special compounds were constantly being added for the new animals
which were coming in. Our best tiger catcher at this time was
Christoph Schulz, who later took over our animal-catching outpost at
Arusha on Mount Kilimanjaro. Schulz wrote a book on his adventures
in the African bush. He was still quite a young man when his friend
Petersen, who was working with him as animal catcher in the basin of
the River Rufiji, was killed. The following letter from the bush gives
a more vivid picture than any second-hand description can of what
Schulz went through.

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

'Mohoro, Christmas 1910.

'Dear Mr. Hagenbeck,

'I have a terrible accident to report. I reached Petersen here at
Mohoro on Christmas Eve. On Christmas Morning Petersen said:
"I say, Schulz, let's go and kill our Christmas dinner." We went
out a mile or so into the bush and sighted some waterbucks, but
did not get a shot.

'We then followed a buffalo trail, and sighted the animal at a
distance of about three hundred and eighty yards. I said, "You
shoot, because I only have a shotgun with me." He said, "Let's
make more sure of him." So we went in closer. All at once the
buffalo stormed up out of the bush, only three paces from us. 1
leapt to one side, he brushed by me and knocked me into a thorn
thicket. I was lucky, because the angry animal then lost sight of me.
But it turned at once and got poor Petersen on his horns. It tossed
him ten feet into the air, caught him again on its horns, and I heard
Pctersen's bones smash. Horrible.

'Now here I am cut off from the whole world. The nearest
Europeans are three hours away. Dar-es-Salaarn is one hundred and
twenty miles and Mohoro is two and a half days from here.

'I had dragged Petersen back here, then buried him. He was
two hundred yards from his house, frightfully mutilated. I am now
quite alone. Early this morning the District Commissioner passed
this way and recorded the accident.

'I am bringing Petersen's animals and the seven hundred pounds
of hippopotamus teeth back with me. I have got planking, but no
assistance. If only I had the forty-eight packing cases ready which I
shall need. I have three weeks left, before the little river steamer
comes. It halts three hours' distance from here. The road is poor.
I must get away from this, I cannot forget the sight of it. Do please
write to his parents. They are elderly folk. If you were to say
he is ill, that would prepare them for it. I am not ashamed to
say that when I buried him I wept; the tears are running as I
write.

'I have ten other hippopotami at Kilva. I shall do what you wrote,
Mr. Hagenbeck. I hope to be in Hamburg in early March.

'Yours very truly,
'Christoph Schulz.'

TROUBLESOME HERITAGE THE ANIMAL PARK

About this time, our attempts to cross pedigree German cattle
and the Indian zebu, to produce a disease-resistant tropical breed,
had awakened the interest of the German Emperor, who also had
such experiments put in hand at his Cadinen country estate in West
Prussia. In September 1908 he had invited my father and brother to a
visit to West Prussia, and Father returned with the Royal Prussian
title of Commercial Counsellor. But although of course he was in one
way very pleased with the distinction, Father definitely disliked being
addressed as by German custom he should thereafter have been
as 'Mr. Counsellor Hagenbeck. '

Father was now at the height of his career. He had his own entry in
German encyclopaedias, which described him as 'the well-known
animal dealer and circus manager, author of Of Beasts and Men.' This
book* soon sold to the tune of a hundred thousand copies in Germany
and was translated into the principal European languages. Meanwhile,
our former bandmaster, Max Winterfeld, a Hamburg man himself,
had made his mark as a light opera composer in Berlin, under the pro-
fessional name of Jean Gilbert. His tunes were on everybody's lips.
One of the songs of his popular musical, Dollie, took all Germany by
storm. The refrain was 'Let's go round to Hagenbeck's, to Hagen-
beck's, to Hagenbeck's . . .' As a march, it became our signature tune,
and when the public joined in they added their own words. In the
North they sang: 'And we'll take all the monkeys out.' In the South
it was : 'There is a pig gone crackers there . . .'

I think it is rather up to me to reproduce here the original text of
the theme song which has helped to broadcast our name :

However remote a spot it is

Where monkeys live the fear's the same.

Back of beyond the bogy's real

And Hagenbeck the bogy's name.

from the remotest jungle places

He brings the tigers and the Iions 9

And with some silly native folk

He puts the beasties through their paces.

But yet the nicest animal there
Is Mr. Hagenbeck's teddy-bear.

* Published in London by Messrs. Longmans in an abridged edition in 1909.

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

CHORUS

let's all go round to Hagenbeck's, Hagenbeck's, Hagenbeck's.

That's where the road for us should end, at Hagenbeck's, at Hagenbeck's.

Let's all go round to Hagenbeck's, Hagenbeck's, Hagenbeck's,

It's dandy to have a teddy like those at Hagenbeck's.

Unhappily, the closing years of my father's life were overshadowed
by illness. Eventually he had to be wheeled in a bath chair through his
animal park. But still he worked hard to realise a new plan which
enjoyed the support of the Kaiser he was to plan a still larger open-
air zoo in Berlin itself.

About one thing, however, Father had no longer any illusions : the
Hamburg Municipality was not going to contribute a single penny
towards Stellingen, for though Hamburg had long since reached that
suburb, it was still 'outside the city's boundaries.' Though Father
never spoke of it, it was no secret to us how bitter it made him never
to have succeeded in finding a site in his native Hamburg both large
and central enough. This had meant that in the first year, even though
the takings were very good they were still insufficient to cover the high
costs, not to speak of any return on the capital invested. Then, as
today, the five profitable summer months which the Hamburg climate
offers were never good enough to cover the seven lean winter and
transitional months.

Moreover, by this date, almost all zoological gardens were regarded
as more or less public amenities which it was right and proper to
subsidise. They were maintained by urban authorities side by side with
museums, theatres and other cultural enterprises. Thus, at Hamburg
the rates supported another zoo, on the present-day Botanical Gardens
site. Here at one time Alfred Edmund Brehm the creator of Brehm's
Life of Animals had been director. But now this was an old-fashioned
institution which could not compare with Stellingen, even though, in
distinction from our animal park, it was subsidised. Even in 1930,
when Stellingen was brought into the ambit of Greater Hamburg, and
the principal Zoological Gardens were moved out to the Dammtor,
there was no improvement in the unsatisfactory traffic links with
Stellingen.

When in 1912 the first underground railway of Hamburg was in-
augurated it ran empty. It was not till free tickets were issued to
children that the grown-ups overcame their fear of the new 'tunnel
railway.' We tried hard then to have the underground line continued

TROUBLESOME HERITAGE THE ANIMAL PARK

out to the animal park, but in vain. Today it is only the No, 16 trams
which pass the entrance. Previously there was also the No. 10, of
which forty years ago those Hamburg humorists, the Wolff brothers,
sang:

'Hurry along there to the No. 10.
You really must see the Hagenbecks.
It's the same picture every dcy y
The Stellingen trams are crowded out
Everybody cramming in,
Till the single cage is full,
the wfor all the world the same
As a Hagenbeck Zoo pantechnicon .'

In those days Heinrich and I found ourselves making numerous trips
to Berlin, to business discussions with Imperial Verderer Wrobel. As
a result of these, we concluded a contract by which we acquired the
development rights of some one hundred and twenty-five acres of the
Jungfern Heath. As a matter of fact, Heinrich and I were really
opposed to this new burden, for in our opinion it was going to strain
our financial resources too far. But Father was always enterprisingly
confident of the future and would not hear any talk of the increasing
danger of a new war.

'All nations have got their bit today,* he would always say. 'There
won't ever be another war like that of 1870-1 !'

In this latter statement, he was quite right but not at all in the
way he meant. It was, I must confess, becoming a little difficult to
work in together with a sick man. Often enough, we kept letters and
newspapers from him, not to excite him too much, but the old saw
about a prophet not being heard in his own territory was certainly
true as far as my father went.

Today his revolutionary idea of showing wild animals in conditions
of liberty is the generally accepted standard of all zoos. Not one of
them can do without the installations which we first tried out at
Stellingen. But in those days it was such a sensation to see lions without
iron bars that when visitors came in and first saw the completely open
lion pit they used to start back in alarm. Soon, however, we had to
limit the crowds by having special admission to that part of the
park.

At the time, however, we also had a sufficiency of critics whose
pens were guided more by envy than anything else. They attempted

7 AML

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

to make out my father's work to be mere showmanship or even hum-
bug. What in those days were called 'Zoological Gardens' were at
best well-kept museums with live animals shut up in them, sorted and
labelled by species for purposes of comparison. The general public,
however, from the very start took Father's side, and as no zoo can
keep its doors open without visitors installations like ours went up
in Europe and America, and before the first patent was extinguished
in the first world war we supplied many sets of plans and models of
Stellingen constructions.

In the summer of 1913 came a visit from one of London's most
famous impresarios, Charles B. Cochran, later knighted. Cochran
had his worries, for the largest city in the world always expected
something new for its winter season from a showman so productive
of surprises as he was. Basing ourselves on our experience at St. Louis
and Buenos Aires, we offered to construct our new-style free con-
ditions for animals of all climes, in London's giant Olympia Hall, and
we said we would cap it all with a circus programme to put all
previous shows of the sort in the shade. Cochran was most
enthusiastic.

Thus it came to 'Carl Hagenbeck's Wonder Zoo and Big Circus,'
which was set up inside the Olympia Hall under Heinrich's direction,
while in addition to our groups of performing animals I was to ensure
that we engaged all that was best in the circuses of Germany, and
bring it all to London, three ships-full of new items. The demand of
London's eight millions was so great that from Boxing Day to February
28th we put on two shows daily and sold every seat. In his Secrets of
a Showman Cochran later said that the Wonder Zoo and Big Circus
'was a stupendous affair,' and the circus part of it 'the finest pro-
gramme ever staged in a single ring.'*

The first world war, however, drew a line through any repetition
of such a peak display of Europe's circus art. It was England's circus
king, Bertram Mills, who became the manager of the subsequent
Olympia shows, which his sons Cyril and Bernard to this day con-
tinue with great success every Christmas. Indeed, they have become
one of the social events of London's winter season.

Shortly before he died, my father conceived the new idea of build-
ing an entirely new sort of monkey-house. I can see him now, propped
up in bed on his pillows, sketching plan after plan. He did not think
it feasible to keep monkeys completely at liberty, but I thought I had a

* Cochran: The Secrets of a Showman, pp. 184-7.

TROUBLESOME HERITAGETHE ANIMAL PARK

better idea than his for enclosing them without robbing them of
essential freedom of movement. This was to pile up huge rocks, like
those one finds in North Africa. Such cliffs are the favourite resort of
the baboon, for in them they find the almost vertical rock faces which
offer them a safe retreat from their principal enemy, the leopard. My
idea was to place my rock pile inside a sort of empty swimming pool,
up the smooth outer edges of which the monkeys would not be able
to climb. The outer wall was to be completely smooth on the inside
and also lean inwards.

I unfolded my scheme to my father and showed him how I imagined
it could be carried out. Heinrich backed me, and, having had some
practice at this sort of thing, he made a plaster model. This without
warning we placed on Father's bed and tensely waited to see his re-
action. For a long time he examined the little plaster rocks from all
angles. Then, slowly and deliberately, without a word he tore up all his
own plans. His blue eyes fixed on us, bright and keen. 'Youngsters,'
he said, 'you can do it far better now than I can ; go ahead ! '

Originally we proposed to construct special living quarters for the
baboons inside the mass of rocks, to be easy to heat whenever we
needed. But when the stove was first lighted, our pile of rock with
smoke emerging from the concealed chimney at the top looked
ridiculously like a miniature Vesuvius. It was too grotesque. Heinrich
therefore had a tunnel cut under the outer protective wall to a nearby
heated living house, to which the animals could have recourse in frosty
weather as they found fit. We were very curious to see how the
monkeys were going to take this little surprise we had prepared for
them. We watched. There was a first-night sort of tension in the air
when the wagon, with two hundred Abyssinian hooded baboons, was
drawn up at the entrance.

With many a grunt and furtive sniff, the animals clambered swiftly
up the rocks, and from on top surveyed the whole scene. The first
surprise, after a long sea journey suddenly finding themselves at
liberty again, was soon followed by the second surprise, to find their
freedom was limited, and all this was reflected in their lively counten-
ances and excited cries. It was an all-round testing out of our theory,
and it worked, up to a point, or rather, up to a line, namely up to a
crack in the cement face of the outer wall. This was soon discovered
by a smart jumper who was up and out before you could say Jack
Robinson ! When the following day a builder appeared with a ladder
to eliminate that possibility of escape, itSvas amusing to observe the

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

quickness with which those monkeys had assessed the situation. A
number of young ones watched the proceedings not only carefully but
with much thought. 'Oeh, oeh, oeh,' they chattered to one another,
as with easy, quick strokes the builder on the ladder proceeded to
make the cement surface smooth. Now or never, they must have decided
at once, and no sooner said than done, for all at once they had clam-
bered up on to the flabbergasted builder's back and over him, and
were beckoning to their comrades to follow them. With considerable
presence of mind, the human ladder climbed out of the pit and pulled
the other ladder up after him. Seeing themselves now surrounded by
some Somalis who were staying with us at Stellingen at the time, the
escapees all leapt back into their compound, and our trouble was
over. Very soon the monkeys had taken full possession of their rocks
and felt so confident in their safety that they installed their regular
sentries, to watch out, at least for a time, to see that their great
enemy the leopard did not come near.

Unhappily, Father never saw the completion of our monkey com-
pound, which certainly was an embellishment of our animal park. On
April 1 4th, 1913, he died. Two days later our keepers bore his coffin
on its last journey. Thus for the last time Father passed through his
beloved park, halting a few moments, as had been his wish, at his
favourite corners, and so to Ohlsdorf Cemetery.

As we lingered at the graveside, our lawyer, Dr. Kleinschmidt, laid
his arms on the shoulders of my brother and myself. 'My dear friends,'
he said, 'you indeed have a worrying heritage, you have not deserved
such a burden.' He knew better than anyone else how much land
Father had acquired, his bank commitments and the exceptionally
heavy loans he had made, to build Stellingen. It was indeed a giant
burden, one which still lies heavy on our shoulders. But we did not
take the prudent advice which he offered us. Our minds were un-
hesitatingly made up. We would discharge the whole debt.

As we had enough land round the animal garden to dispose of,
Heinrich concluded an agreement with Hugo Haase, Showman King
of the time, and to the animal garden was added an amusements park,
which at that time had its parallel nowhere. This was opened in May
1914. It included an impressive scenic railway, which ran through an
artificial Alpine landscape, and from the high points of the track of
which visitors had a glimpse of a switchback railway, a water-chute
and a reproduction of the lovely scenery of the Zillerthal valley. Even

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TROUBLESOME HERITAGETHE ANIMAL PARK

after the bullets at Sarajevo had startled the whole world, there were
still few in Germany who realised how near was the unholy conflagra-
tion which was so soon to set the whole world in flames. Even the
mobilisation of the Army failed to reduce our gate, which during the
first year of the war was a record one, a peak not again to be touched
for decades.

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WARTIME CIRCUSES WITH AND WITHOUT TENTS

HAVING COME back from a visit to America in the year of my father's
death with a brief-case full of orders, I crossed the Atlantic again in
1914, to deliver the animals in question. On this occasion I lectured
to the Zoological Society of St. Louis on the construction of Stellingen,
for the people over there were mooting a zoo, and we were interested
in getting the contract to build it. To give a bit of life to my lecture,
I resorted to a little publicity device. Mine was an after-dinner talk,
and at the crucial point I contrived to have two young lions let loose
under the table. They were only seven-month-old cubs, but they cer-
tainly produced the effect I wanted. The hundred guests, all rather
drowsy with food and drink, were on their feet at once.

It was, indeed, more productive of clarity of mind than any double-
strength black coffee would have been. There were even some so
scared that they climbed on to their chairs. By the time I had con-
vinced them demonstrably how harmless my animals still were they
were all thoroughly awake. Then I really could begin my lecture, and
you see, I knew my American pressmen I had secured myself a
good press.

Those two lions were named Hans and Gretchen, and I presented
them to the future zoo. Two years later, in the throes of the first
world war, what should I receive from the St. Louis Zoo but a tele-
gram. The U.S.A. was then still neutral, and it was suggested that I
should make my way across to America in one of our U-boats, then
doing their best to break the Allied blockade. For the St. Louis people
wanted me to build up their zoo for them. Unfortunately, it was
already out of the question for me to go. Soon enough after that Hans
and Gretchen were re-christened America had entered the war on
the other side.

At the very outset of hostilities, my brother Heinrich, being a
reservist, was called. Colomban Uncle John, after an adventurous
escape from British internment, made his way through Java and Italy
to Hamburg, and on him and me fell the responsibility of managing
Stellingen, with its heavy load of responsibility, its steadily decreasing

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WARTIME CIRCUSES WITH AND WITHOUT TENTS

attendance and its equally relentlessly rising costs for food got scarce,
and so did coal. My nephew, Paid Mehrmann, who since 1911 had
been the firm's accountant and a magnificent organiser of our domestic
pets' department, found himself on the Western Front in the forces.
Nearly all our really reliable attendants and animal catchers were also
in the Army.

One of them, indeed, rode high in field-grey uniform on an
elephant, too! This was our good old Jack-in-the-Box, Matthias
Walter the same who had gone round the Cape of Good Hope with
me in the dromedary ship and occupied the enamel throne next to
mine at Swakopmund. He and his working elephant Jenny made war
history.

It was like this. Matthias was in the Red Sea on his way home on the
s.s. Axenfals when the radio picked up the news of the outbreak of war
and this was broadcast from the bridge. Matthias had eleven elephants
with him on board. The captain steamed as fast as he could to the
as it then was Italian colonial port of Massawa. From there the
elephants were taken to Brindisi on an Italian tramper and thence went
to Stellingen by rail.

Two days later Matthias, being a naval reservist, had donned his
blue naval uniform at Wilhelmshaven and exchanged his elephant goad
for a carbine. Five months later, he was at Middelkerke on the Belgian
North Sea coast when orders came through from the Supreme Com-
mand to proceed at once to Stellingen and thence bring back a work-
ing elephant named Jenny. Jenny had suddenly been classed as k.f.,
or fit for active service,* and so with draught harness and marching
rations reached the truck in which under 'Oberbootsmannmaat* or
Assistant Bo 'sun Matthias Walter she was to proceed to the Western
Front.

At Avesnes station, south of Maubeuge, the German infantry men
had something to stare at when for the first time in their lives they saw
a bluejacket riding high up on an elephant. But there was work for
Jenny to do. In the large woods of Felleries, just behind the front lines,
Jenny began to earn her daily bread in the pit-prop industry. Every
morning, off she went to the forest. Tremendous old trees came
crashing down and were trimmed back to the trunk. Then along came
Jenny and with head, trunk and front legs reduced the confusion of
trunks, lying all ways, one on top of the other, to decent order. Next

* K.J.=Kiiegsfertig, the German expression for 'fit for active service.'

103

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

she dragged all the timber out to the high road and to a sawmill which
turned the timber into pit-props for the trenches.

Daily, Jenny transported fifty trees, among them some that twelve
horses could not have shifted. She could fell a tree two feet in diameter
all by herself. She was quite systematic about it. First she would shake
it, till she had loosened up the roots. Then she got her fore legs and
powerful shoulder against the trunk, reared on her hind legs and
brought her six-thousand-pound weight to bear. It was remarkable
that she never broke a tree off; it was always the roots which were
made to give way, with loud reports, till the earth heaved up and she
brought the tree crashing down.

In time, Jenny was employed everywhere that they could fit her in,
as a sort of maid of all heavy work. There was a traction engine that
the French had driven into a pit to prevent us using it, but Jenny
yanked it out all right. A column of motorised transport got stuck in
the mud Jenny put them on their way again. She was even harnessed
to the plough, and the old parade ground at Floumont was turned into
arable land, and ploughed twice as deep, too, as any ordinary team
could have done it.

Her greatest triumph, however, this bulky figure in 'self ' field grey
achieved in the goods marshalling yards of Floumont. She had been
working all day long as 'shunting engine,' making up trains, and Walter
had just hooked her to four loaded trucks in a siding. Then up came a
General, who no doubt was seeing this for the first time, for he
laughed and made a scornful gesture, as if to say: 'She'll never pull
that. 1 Then Jenny just leant her powerful shoulder against the rear
wagon and all the trucks moved, slowly at first, but with gathering
speed sixty tons of load. Speechless, the General at once produced
six cigarettes and a special ginger cake for Jenny.

Our elephant became famous all down the front. In the evenings,
for full measure, she would sometimes add a little bonus show of her
circus arts, and the laughter of the chaps on their amphitheatre of
tree-trunks could be heard a mile away.

The only thing Jenny could not stand was an aeroplane, and it did
not matter whether it was ours or an enemy one. If one came her way
and her trusted rider was not to hand to calm her, she would swing
her trunk in the air and trumpet loudly and combatively, pricking up
her huge ears and trying to locate the enemy whose thundering din
she heard. On Sundays people said one could have believed oneself in
India, for then Jenny did no work, but was free to wander through

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WARTIME CIRCUSES WITH AND WITHOUT TENTS

the woods and pick delicacies for herself. But at a call she always
came straight back to Walter, just like a faithful dog.

For more than two years this 'outsize number in field grey* of the
first world war worked like this, the first and, I think, the only war
elephant on the books of the Wehrmacht. But then, towards the very
end, in 1918, Walter was badly wounded. She then returned home,
herself unwounded. She died in the thirties, pensioned off in the
Strassburger Circus.

As the war went on, the food problem at Stellingen grew more and
more serious. Whereas in the early days, owing to our connections
in the Army Command, we contrived to get large supplies of horse-
flesh in from abroad, these eventually ceased to be sufficient to cover
our needs. Our pride, the sea-elephants, were the first to go, through
lack of fresh sea fish. The remaining seals gradually died, as they could
not live indefinitely on fresh- water fish.

Losses increased attendance decreased. As the war enthusiasm
faded, military concerts lost their appeal. Though in my letters to
Heinrich, still in the Army, I did not mention all the details, for there
was no point in giving him fruitless worry, he nevertheless read be-
tween the lines and guessed how things were.

I had just gone to Sweden again to buy up horseflesh when Adolf
Strassburger offered me his circus. But I had not the money. Nor had
Uncle John, at Stellingen, anything in the kitty. Yet he supported the
plan which I immediately conceived. As our name stood well in
Hamburg, and in spite of the bad financial position our credit was
good, I plucked up the courage to apply to the famous banker, Max
Warburg. He immediately accommodated me with a rather large sum,
sufficient to enable me to offer Strassburger a good price and make
preparations to start a new Carl Hagenbeck tented circus. There was
no lack of performing animals at Stellingen, and we had enough exotic
animals at our empty mangers to be able to send a seemly animal show
on to the road.

I bought back two elephants from that veteran circus manager,
Hermann Blumenfeld he had bought them from us shortly before the
beginning of the war. Blumenfeld was a temperamental fellow, known
as Hermann-Hermann, because he used to get so excited that he
always repeated the end of a sentence once or twice.

'Jolly glad,' he assured me, 'jolly glad to give you your old ele-
phants back; they're eating me out of house and home, house and

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

home, anyway out at my place at Magdeburg at Magdeburg they're just
standing about on the chain, on the chain. You can pay me when you
like, you like. Send me the draft home, simple address, just Blumen-
feld, Guhrau-Guhrau.'

'Guhrau once or twice?' I asked.

'Why, once, of course, just Guhrau-Guhrau.'

'Just Guhrau, then?'

'Oh no, damn it, I've not got any birds, any birds . . .'

The animals reached Malmo at the end of March, where in the
meantime Strassburger's wagons had been painted orange and blue
and with our name. Now the seventy-six horses which we had taken
over, the three elephants and a number of zebras, camels and donkeys
had the opportunity of welcoming new colleagues arriving from
Stellingen. With the outbreak of war my old friend and teacher Richard
Sawade had hastened home from South America, and now stood at my
side while I made preparations for our first night in the Oslo circus
building.

'A circus manager's place is in the ring, especially when the circus
bears so famous a name I' Thus Sawade, and he was quite right.
Though I had hitherto never worked in the ring, I now took on the
elephant group, trained by an old keeper of ours to a new number
performed together with the Strassburger elephants. I had only time
for five rehearsals with them in our Swedish winter quarters. One of
the group was a large Sumatran bull elephant with tusks about three
feet long, and his idea was at the outset to make sure that his new
owner respected him, to which end he made a persistent attack on me.
Luckily I was pretty good at handling the fourteen-foot-long elephant
whip and getting round him, cracking it, which of course all went to
enhance the dramatic effect.

First night! Standing in the paddock behind the scenes, awaiting
the whistle cue with my elephants, I had a real touch of footlights
fever. There was my cue, my entry march. Curtain up! And I was
already in the dazzle of the ring. Behind the scenes Sawade had just
handed me a big glass of champagne. I bowed forcefully to the
audience and then I saw my elephants already racing round me at
such speed that I could hardly tell which was first and which last. My
faithful coachman Otto, who saw it all, stood right in their track. But
in a moment I had the animals under my command, though I had to
keep whispering to Otto to ask what came next! 'On one foot.'
'Pirouette !' he prompted me, and I bellowed out my orders as if the

1 06

WARTIME CIRCUSES WITH AND WITHOUT TENTS

poor elephants were hard of hearing. Those first few minutes were
centuries to me. Ah, but there it was at last, the triumphal march
from Aida. All up for the pyramid stand! Our turn was over, and we
marched out !

My dress shirt was glued to my body, but the applause seemed all
right. The Oslo folk were enthusiastic. Sawade gave me a satisfied
wink of his left eye. Nevertheless, a few days later I learned my lesson.
Advance agent, press manager and business organiser all at the same
time, I had taken the night express to Stockholm. What was that I
heard during the night? A cheerful mixed company of fellow passengers
had mentioned my name. They were laughing. Why were they laugh-
ing? They were laughing because I had shouted so when I was in the
ring ! Vox populi! After that I tuned down my ring voice to drawing-
room strength, and my poor elephants showed their gratitude by
becoming surprisingly docile.

Apart from our group of tigers, produced once more by Richard
Sawade, our lion tamer, Willy Peters, had also enterprisingly filled
the gap as polar bear tamer. Now, polar bears are at first sight as alike
one another as peas. Dispatch was essential. The veteran bear tamer
had time to tell Peters the run of the show and the names of the
animals, but unfortunately there was no time to get to know them
individually by their names. To cut a long story short, Peters got
some red poster paint and gave each bear a distinguishing mark on its
forehead. But during the performance the bears scratched their noses,
once then again and again and this, together with their bodily
heat, made the paint run. Suddenly there was an outburst of indignant
cries from the audience, who thought that the bears were bleeding.
'Brutes 1' they cried, 'cruelty to animals 1 Get outl* Soon rabid
Swedish animal-lovers were in search of me, together with the police,
and it took a great deal of effort to convince them what had really
happened.

Because of the war, I could not take many of my staff to Scandinavia.
It was hard work all day, and often all night too. I often saw day break
while I was still bent over letters to Uncle John, who was more and
more pressing in his requests for funds to carry on the animal park,
and to Heinrich and the banks and lawyers who handled our many
business enterprises.

I also recall writing a heartfelt letter of thanks to a good friend in
America, the publisher of the Denver Post newspaper of Colorado. He

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ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

had written very warmly to my most astonished wife to express his
condolences when in 1 9 1 7 he learned that I had fallen on the Western
Front. In his paper he had given me a fine obituary, praising me to the
skies and not forgetting to add: 'Lorenz Hagenbeck's word was as
good as a bank guarantee. ' With his letter he sent a copy of the news-
paper, so I had to hasten to give him a sign of belated life.

Gothenburg was the place where we first muffed it. Unfortunately
I had allowed myself to be talked into engaging new, local musicians.
It had seemed too expensive to take our initial Oslo orchestra with us
on tour. But if it is in any case no easy matter for a conductor to keep a
circus programme in time with all the items of the performance and
provide a really good musical accompaniment, it turns into real chaos
when the man is both new, and intoxicated, and moreover is backed
up in this by all his band. The pianist alone a girl who was a tee-
totaller was powerless to save the situation.

Nevertheless, taking it all round, I was very happy. My heart
danced for sheer delight. My childhood toy circus had really come to
life, wagons and tent complete. And this time I had no need to take
care not to spoil my mother's floor and I could also lead my own
elephants in the ring !

When the day came to erect the big top in Sweden my glance kept
stealing up to the sky and I kept my fingers crossed, lest a sudden
squall should serve me with the bad luck Father had with his first tent
in the Heiligengeist Field. But the clerk of the weather was reasonable,
and for three days the Swedes thronged in. I breathed again, for now
not only could I pay some bills, I was also in a position to send a
hundred thousand crowns to Uncle John in Stellingen. For the first
time I went out with a friend for a really enjoyable ride in the lovely
outskirts of the city in our circus there was hardly a horse which
was only ridden in the ring.

We trotted over the sands of the shore, on the one hand the steely
blue Baltic, on the other the green woods which fringed the coast.
Suddenly there was a burst of machine-gun fire, and before I knew
where I was I was prostrate in the soft moss, my black horse swiftly^
vanishing among the trees, while my companion was clinging desper-
ately to his wildly bucking hack and shouting:* 'Help me, I have a
broken knee-cap !' Thank heavens I was not injured myself, and could
take my friend's horse in hand, and then we got out of the way, and
I went in chase of my horse. Later I found out that the nag I had

1 08

WARTIME CIRCUSES WITH AND WITHOUT TENTS

chosen had been trained to a cowboy programme in Strassburger's
circus and when it heard shooting was supposed to gallop out of the
ring!

Had not anxiety about Germany overshadowed that Swedish year,
it would have been one of my loveliest memories. I grew more and
more enthusiastic about that lovely land of sea, woods and endless
sunlit summer nights, in which we bathed and fished or rode our ele-
phants into the woods, where they could graze at will in the midnight
sunshine as if they were in India.

We also played to full houses in that Northern Venice, Stockholm,
for a month, and I was so delighted by the wonderful way they accepted
a German circus at the hottest part of the submarine war that later I
sent Skansen, the director of the Stockholm Zoo, three European
bison, or aurochs, as a present. Moreover, the animals bred, so that
today, after the loss of the second world war by Germany, Springe
on the River Deister is one of the few places in the world where
this original species of the forests of Germany has been preserved
pure-blooded.

After the end of this first Scandinavian tour with our tented circus,
I ventured on a second visit to the Oslo Tivoli building. It was a great
success. However, there was one incident which remains unforgettable.
In addition to Sawade's tiger group, our programme also included the
trainer Willy Peters, whom I have mentioned above as animal tamer
and later circus manager. The circus world knows him as Soda-water
Willy, because he was under doctor's orders to satisfy his unquench-
able thirst principally by that beverage. Conscientious here as in
everything else, he would never order a brandy without first ordering
a siphon of soda-water. The only trouble was that he often failed to
drink the soda. Nor was the forge tfulness due exclusively to haste, and
if you saw a collection of siphons anywhere you could generally
locate Willy not far off. It is, however, not of his thirst but of his
lion item that I meant to talk. We had a couple of ladder balancers,
Altenburg and Hofimann, who hit on the unhappy notion of
increasing the attraction by doing their turn directly over the lions'
cage.

I flatly opposed the idea, but they pleaded with me so long and
made so much of the great publicity which would result not to
speak of how useful it would also be to themselves in their career
that in the end I gave my permission, though I did take the precaution

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ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

of making them sign a document to say that the hazardous balancing
act was being undertaken at their own request.

The performance proceeded, and up above the central cage, with
its lions, rose the ladders on which the luckless couple were wont to
show their hand-stands and all the rest of it. Beneath them there were
the lions, gaping up, and also, of course, the audience, breathless at
the men's daring.

But suddenly there was a roaring, and two lions got to grips, fight-
ing. Now the situation was indeed dramatic. But, unimpressed by
what was going on below, the men up top continued their airy antics,
and everything would have passed off, I am sure, quite well had it not
been for Peters. He suddenly felt he had to assert his authority and
fire his revolver's blank cartridges, to get those two lions apart, and
now what the roaring had not done the sudden reports certainly did.
One of the two men so started that to the horror of the crowd he
slipped, to be caught only at the last moment by his partner, and there
the two dangled, with the lions licking their chops in expectation
and the audience all with gooseflesh. After that I prohibited the busi-
ness, nor did either Altenburg or Hoffmann utter a word of protest
when I did so.

By now in Germany such pleasant things as ham and salami had
become rarities, and before we went back every man was anxious to
smuggle something out for the folk at home. But somebody tipped off
the Oslo police and the circus was combed through, to make sure
we were not exporting prohibited goods, which included gold, rubber
and a long list of things held to be of use in war.

Richard Sawade was just going through with his last tiger item of
our farewell performance when the police descended on us and began
the search. As at that moment the animal wagons were empty, the
guardians of the law surged into them, tapping the walls and boring
holes in the floors. For do not the best circus novelettes lay it down
that the cages of the great carnivores are the finest smuggling
deposits?

Fortunately, at this point the Norwegian manager of the Tivoli
came on the scene, and mollified his over-zealous compatriots, who
for all their pocket lamps and drills had found nothing at all. To con-
sole them he had them brought a drink each, and when I saw these
pjolters approaching a pjolter is a sort of Norwegian whisky and soda
I absented myself as rapidly as I could and had recourse to a nearby
butcher's shop, where I bought a whole hog (slaughtered), quantities oi

WARTIME CIRCUSES WITH AND WITHOUT TENTS

bacon, ham, sausage and all the rest, all of which I packed into the
empty animal wagon. The police now were kind enough to put their
seals on the door! When it was properly labelled 'Lion and tiger
food' I thought it was the best consignment I had ever had for that
purpose. It certainly delighted our good two-legged Stellingen pets
when we got home, for it was again Christmas time, and somehow I
had not had time on the way to feed a single piece of that meat into
my carnivores' hungry mouths !

I took my boyhood friend and years-long tamer Reuben Carstang
a big jar of real Hamburg eel soup, and that soup was cooked from
stock made from a real Norwegian hambone Reuben's favourite
dish. Together with all the things which go with it, I presented myself
at the entrance to the Berlin foreigners' internment camp, out on the
Ruhleben road, for it was there tint as an Englishman the poor fellow
had spent the whole war.

Now, while the circus continued working, in the Stettin Central
Hall, in order at least to cover the winter costs in Germany, Uncle
John managed to hire the empty Chiniselli circus building in Warsaw.
It was terribly cold when we loaded up at Stettin for Warsaw. Once
again the Army Enlistment H.Q. combed through our personnel, so
there I was myself, in driving snow, working elephant Jumbo at my
side. All night long Jumbo had been busy heaving our circus wagons on
to railway platform trucks. Ten long hours that faithful animal, well
wrapped in a padded tarpaulin, kept by my side and worked so dili-
gently that I shared my last bottle of rum with her that is to say, I
used her half bottle to mix her a tubful of warm grog.

What a contrast to our Scandinavian tour ! Most of the windows in
our filthy circus train were broken. The savage wind swept the fine
snow in through every crevice. The journey took three days and
nights, for we had to spend many hours in sidings, letting military
trains go through, before our ark on wheels could move on. Once
there, we played two months long in the Polish capital. There was
ample horseflesh for the carnivores, but not sufficient raw greenstuff
for our herbage eaters, so that we lost two elephants, one of these
being Nauke, a bull with magnificent tusks. This was a hard loss for us;
for now, during the war, it was of course out of the question to get
substitutes from India.

We were all very glad when in 1917 I succeeded once again in
getting to Scandinavia. This time we started our tour in the Copen-
hagen circus building. By now, however, the war was making its

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

mark here too. Coal supplies had run out, and to economise the
Danish Government had ordered all electric current to be cut off two
days a week. That was bad luck indeed. We could not give perfor-
mances in the darkened building. Nor could I use the tent any more,
for, as circus folk say, it had a starry sky to it now. The top was like a
sieve, so that it really did look inside as if there were stars above one.
But there were no more materials available for repairs no canvas,
ropes or spare parts and as poverty was now bearing hard on the
Stellingen Animal Park, we searched Germany from one end to the
other to find stages or empty halls where we could put on a show. At
last my applications to Holland bore fruit, but before we could go
there I had to go through a fancy riding performance with the military
authorities, a hard job, especially when one's mount has been trained
to the military mind.

In place of my staff now in the forces, I had engaged Danes and
Swedes, for whom I suddenly found I lacked exit visas. Three times
we loaded up at Bremen, but had to unload again. It was enough to
make one despair. And when I did get all the necessary papers through,
it was to find myself chasing rolling-stock again, for what I had already
had at my disposal had in the meantime been snatched up for more im-
portant work. At this point my business representative telegraphed
from Amsterdam: 'I shall go mad, am here with staff and orchestra,
what am I to do without funds?' I replied: 'I am already mad, wait
till I come.'

We got there; I had at last manoeuvred all our men through the
red-tape front, even our German horse trainer. We unloaded at
Sloten, an Amsterdam suburb, and when the first full evening takings
had been banked, in my relief, together with my business manager, I
tossed down a couple of tots of good Hollands gin. But the second of
these stuck in my throat because of the scare which now came : it
was the Amsterdam chief of police, laconically to tell me that this
had been 'Mijnheer HagenbeckV first and last performance in Hol-
land. He explained that the press had attacked us sharply, and it was
claimed that our numerous personnel and animals would reduce the
Dutch people's rations still further.

Comrade Hollands had, however, worked wonders, brightening
me up considerably, and at once I had a census taken of all the Dutch
workers engaged on work for our circus tent men, musicians,
drivers, porters. After the principal item of the next performance our

112

My father and his favourite Walrus; a painting by l.ovis Corinth
(Hamburg Art Gallery)

Together with my brother, Hcinrich, I receive Kaiser Wilhelm II at
Stellingen. On the right, with walking-stick, is Count Ferdinand vim Zeppelin

Stellingen's Zoological sensation of 1925 ! Goliath the Sea-Elephant

WARTIME CIRCUSES WITH AND WITHOUT TENTS

trumpeters blew a triple blast, and I thanked the audience for their
applause, which I assured them I found most encouraging, so en-
couraging, in fact, that I requested their support. I then told them
what the police chief had said, and pointed out that there were three
hundred and four Dutchmen at that moment in our employ, so I
hoped that Holland would be able to feed my German staff of
seven, all specialists, without whom I could not do. I said I was
forced to make this statement because a hostile press had alleged
the opposite. I bowed and the band played the Dutch national
anthem.

There was great applause, and the next morning I sent a deputation
of my Dutch employees to The Hague to the Ministry of the Interior,
while my two Belgian business representatives put forward my written
application to be allowed to continue. I also went to The Hague, but
did not even get inside the Ministry, for there was our delegation
already coming out, beaming all over we had our permit !

Most of the newspapers now printed fair criticism, but there were
still some which continued to paint our food-snatching presence in
the blackest colours. One even went so far as to warn its readers to
keep their dogs and cats indoors, lest our circus folk caught them and
stuffed them 1 However, this warning had a sharp boomerang effect,
for the very next morning there was a most enterprising Dutchman at
our door with a whole wagon-load of dead dogs and cats, which he
tried to sell us. He was furious when we explained that we had no use
for them, and with some amusement we saw him withdraw, grumbling,
to call upon a certain newspaper editor !

I think we received the most courteous treatment from the manager
of the Scheveningen Seaside Resort Company. Here most of the hotels
were full of British wounded, and the British military police had set
patrols all round us, to prevent their folk coming to our shows, at a
moment when so few miles away terrible battles were being fought.
This blockade, however, did not defeat the good British. The name
of Hagenbeck triumphed over the war and the artificial hatred of
peoples, and the British officers found their way in as Dutch
civilians !

In the autumn of 1918 I would have liked to hire the Chiniselli
building in Warsaw again, but my application was so firmly refused
by the German military authorities that I felt pretty sure that we were
on the point of losing the war. We had indeed then begun to with-
draw on all fronts. Holland and Scandinavia had just seen our show.

9-AML

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

What next, then? In Dresden, Breslau and Berlin other circuses had
their permanent buildings. However, there was one great conurba-
tion with a densely packed population which had no circus. This was
the Ruhr. So I sent my business representative, Dr. Katz, to approach
the city fathers of Essen, and the results of that enterprise were good.

WE BECOME BILLIONAIRES

i TOOK a trip to Bremen and bought up the scaffolding of the trans-
portable building which the firm of Car6 used to erect for the Bremen
'Freemarket.' I now had my main structure, so I looked round and
found a building firm to fit stabling, lighting, heating and so forth. The
work of erection at Essen was to be completed by Christmas, 1918,
but the time limit had to be stretched as badly as the cost. However,
at last we could start. It was February i9th, 1919. Our intimacy with
the city of Essen began, and here we now found a second home.

I still marvel that the police inspectors responsible for building
regulations ever let us open our doors. They must clearly have been
great circus fans themselves. I can still picture our cashier at the pay
desk that opening day, huddled in a thick winter overcoat, wrapped
in blankets (with relays of heated bricks as hassocks for his chilled
feet). Inside, one came on planks to cross over the trenches in which
electric cables and various pipe systems were yet to be laid. There
was a general shortage of window glass. Snow drifted in all over the
place.

Originally I had conceived of this as merely winter quarters for our
circus, but in the end we decided to make Essen our permanent circus
home. This decision, I will confess, was much facilitated by the fact
that with two shows daily after a run of years we were still able to sell
out full houses ! The Essen folk proved circus-minded to a high degree
and took whatever we gave them. We provided first-class circus stuff,
water displays, with floodlit fountains reaching to the ceiling,
'Wallenstein's Camp' a scene from Schiller and Belbosq's 'Kiki on
a Marmot Journey,' as our manager christened a really funny eques-
trian programme. It all went. To Essen I took everything and any-
thing that was good and expensive.

If today you were to ask any old hand of Krupps, or such a man as
my old friend Jacob Funke, now a newspaper proprietor, but then
merely a brilliant young reporter, who often handled the circus
reports, and you will find that everybody of that age recalls Spichalski
the clown, Kiki the dwarf clown, August Molker with his 'lions on
the sofa* or the Icarus family of the name of Lorch. Hagenbeck's

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

show in Viehhof Square has become an indispensable chapter of Essen
history.

At the same time, what times of stress those Ruhr days could be !
There were many occasions when we had to fling ourselves headlong
down in the office, to avoid the bullets which suddenly came flicking
in, to bury themselves in the plaster of the wall. I can recall our aerial
acrobats dropping like ripe plums into the safety net one day when
machine-gun fire suddenly turned the roof into a sieve. Revolution
suddenly marched through the streets. One day we had mutinous
troops demanding horses and weapons of us, and they took away even
the wooden dummy guns we used in our shows and the blank car-
tridge pistols used by our animal tamers. There were riotous scenes in
those days in the restaurants, revolutionary soldiers and their girls
dancing on the dining tables. But whenever our circus doors opened,
differences for the moment seemed to vanish, and we saw Spartacists,
socialists and militarists, those who plundered and those who were
plundered, all sitting together, captivated by the display at once ancient
and modern.

Every night I would creep cautiously through the streets to my
hotel, bearing a whole suitcase-full of paper money, one man scout-
ing ahead, another covering me behind with a stout cudgel, till with
a sigh of relief I saw our 'treasure* locked away in the hotel strong-
room. Now we became millionaires, multi-millionaires, billionaires,
trillionaires with the dollar at last reaching 4-20 billion paper
marks. I do not think my nephew, later chief cashier, ever knew
exactly how many noughts one was supposed to stick on the end.

We went to Holland that summer with a totally new programme,
and there earned good Dutch gulden, while every week at Stellingen
we handed out two laundry-baskets of paper money, and our em-
ployees, when they were paid, used to hurry, because while they were
still waiting in the queues outside the shops the printing presses were
almost certainly turning out more millions, and prices might rise still
higher. At one time a mere fifty guldens were sufficient to cover our
animal park outgoings for a whole month !

However, all this financial juggling was not going to create flesh
for our carnivorous animals. We had lost our seals to the fishmonger
during the war. Now we lost our lions and tigers from eating meat
which was bad. We pulled our polar bears round thanks only to the
use of some millions of marks' worth of camomile flowers, using

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WE BECOME BILLIONAIRES

these for inhalations to make the animals sweat. How does one per-
suade a polar bear to inhale, the question may be asked? Simple. You
fill an elephant's drinking trough with steaming camomile tea and lift
your polar bear cages on top of this, bar side down. That way the
bears have little option, and the camomile vapour is bound to enter
their streaming noses.

But at last, not to lose heavily, we had to sell our animal stock
abroad, and as the animal park emptied we were also obliged to dis-
miss faithful old employees. Hagenbeck's Animal Park finally closed
its doors on October 3rd, 1920. A few specimens which we saved
from this wreck we sent to the Ruhr. At Riittenscheid we acquired an
enormous machine shop which had been stripped bare, and there we
opened a large animal show. That same winter we brought our other
circus back from Holland and put on a programme in the Busch
building in Reeper Street, Hamburg. It was here that the famous
* Three Codonas* began their world-famous triple somersaults be-
tween trapezes, a feat nobody else has ever achieved.

The first people to visit us when the war was over were young John
Ringling and his wife. John had now grown into a fine figure of a man.
When something pleased him he had a trick of jerking his head,
pursing his lips and whistling softly to himself. Our horse trainer had
just taken on his team of sixteen blacks, each in white harness with a
large brass number plate. 'Now then, mix it! 1 he would cry, and go
out of the ring, whereupon the horses would gambol about, weaving
in utter disorder, like children at playtime. A moment later, he
would return and cry: 'In your places,' and they would at once form
up in proper order. This performance really did make John Ringling
whistle, and our wonderfully trained eighteen polar bears, twelve
Bengal tigers and the exotic item with fourteen zebras and camels also
pleased him mightily. In due course he wrote us a handsome cheque,
in addition transferring to us four elephants out of his American herd,
which by steady purchasing in these years since we last met he had
built up to some ninety animals.

These star turns sailed to America on the American steamship
Hawaiian, while our assistant, Emil Kohrmann, took our show on a
tour of the North German states, hoping at least to earn the animals
their keep. Twice daily he sent us the paper money he took at the gate,
because the value of this often dropped in the course of the day.
Despite the losses this entailed, we were able soon enough to buy
dollar bills sufficient once again to send men out to catch wild animals

117

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

and bring them to us at Stellingen, rebuilding our animal park and our
animal trade all over again.

Heinrich and I now established two firms abroad, the Carl Hagen-
beck Animal Trading Company and Circus Ltd., of The Hague, and
the Hagenbeck Brothers Company, of New York. With foreign bank
loans we succeeded in re-establishing our business, and in 1922 the
first of our men, veteran Jtirgen Johannsen, brought the first large
contingent of animals in this postwar period of trade from India into
the port of Hamburg. Heinrich was in North America when this fine
herd of ten young elephants arrived. It was a sight I had not seen for
many a long day, and with the elephants came numerous Bengal
tigers, leopards, crocodiles and exotic birds and three hundred
rhesus monkeys. I could have embraced each of those young elephants
for sheer delight. At once it occurred to me that I must reopen the
animal park, if only for a day, and all former members of my staff
supported me. Years after I was reminded by an old friend who was
present that I myself got so excited that I banged my desk with delight
so hard that I cracked two of the boards. 'Done/* I cried, 'on with it! 9
I seized the telephone at once, to beat up recruits and prepare the
press. For a few days I had an aeroplane circling over Hamburg,
dropping half a million leaflets which read: 'People of Hamburg!
Does your animal park still mean anything to you? If so, come to
Stellingen on Sunday.'

The result exceeded expectations. Two and twenty thousand
visitors poured through our vast gate with the elephant statuary. I
had to make that special revival a two days' show. After that, I had
to send on the animals, for they were already sold to America.

Meanwhile, Heinrich had renewed our old contacts in Buenos
Aires, and soon Fritz Essler was on his way to the Antarctic to get us
more sea-elephants. Jiirgen Johannsen sent a big new contingent of
stock in from India, and Christoph Schulz from Africa. Our animal
trade was on the up-grade again.

Then, in 1924, that unholy bubble, 'inflation/ burst. Schacht
introduced the rentenmark currency. Overnight, millionaires were
turned to beggars. Banks crashed. The press was full of news of
suicides of ruined men and the sale of old-established business houses.
It was a severe stroke, but essential to bring the German economy
back to health. Heinrich and I now decided that after three years of
closed doors our Stellingen zoo must open again. At once the whole
place came to new life, lawns being mowed, new gravel rolled, the

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WE BECOME BILLIONAIRES

Japanese temples repainted with red lacquer and so forth, and after
some weeks of round-the-clock work we finally opened our doors
again on May 24th, 1924. We had only one great hindrance the
memory of the general public. Though everybody had suffered just
as we had in the past ten years, we would hear scornful remarks to the
effect that 'if the old man had still been alive, there would have been
more animals than this.' People were forgetting that in those 'good
old days' a glass of beer cost only ten pfennigs. In the meantime, we
had lost a world war. Besides, we were starting everything again from
scratch, and all at our own expense.

Now, however, we were to have a sensation which had been
unknown in Father's time. 'Goliath', a fully grown sea-elephant,
appeared in the park as the first of his kind. His travelling quarters
were the size of the largest pantechnicon made. He weighed no less
than 5,300 Ib. avoirdupois I He could have outbalanced two school
forms together with their masters ! To get Goliath into the park we
used our working elephant, Roma, but before Roma pushed the
enormous van she took a peep inside, and virtually squeaked with
delight at the comical vast tubby thing she saw inside, with funny
flippers for arms and a clownish face.

'Push, Roma!' we cried. Roma pulled herself together, and the
enormous packing case slid up the ramp on to the edge of the Ant-
arctic Panorama pool. Nearby, penguins which had come by the same
ship were already carefully examining their new home. Goliath's
arrival was like a grand public reception. There were crowds of the
general public, and of course, in the forefront, also Nature specialists
and the directors of several zoos.

The capture of Goliath had been a chapter all by itself, for it had
been no easy matter to net such a monster and get him on board ship.
And, once on board, he had had to stay in his box, even crossing the
Equator, and do without his daily dip, making do with good periodical
hosings down. But for the more than forty days of the journey across
he had not eaten a scrap of food not that the fast showed at all when
one looked at him.

Our attendants opened the travelling box, and out he came, a
battleship-grey mountain of fat, a mobile paunch, capped by a diminu-
tive, neckless head. Then he smelted water, and the jaws opened to
emit one tremendous bellow as he plunged into the pool, into which
we had tipped a few hundredweight of salt and four hundred pounds
of live codling ! The tremendous splash drenched the front-line radio

119

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

commentators of the old Norag broadcasting company and many of
the pressmen and reporters. Mouth wide open, Goliath forged a
foaming path across that tank, and not one fish ever missed those
snapping yellow- toothed jaws. At last he emerged again from the
frothing water, shook his pointed snout, and bellowed like an enor-
mous foghorn with sheer delight, before, obviously delighted with
this first little step towards removal of his loose tummy pleats, he
settled down on the sandy shore to belch softly and take a well-earned
forty winks. Anyone who had not seen him shooting all ways to and
fro through that water like an erratic torpedo would now, even as
near as only twenty feet from him, take him merely to be an outcrop
of shining rock, eroded smooth by the sea.

He was not there long. By the very next steamer from the other side
there was the American circus king John Ringling, all out to acquire
Goliath for his 'Greatest Show of the World. 1 When he saw the
mammoth creature, John gave another of those nods and whistled
softly to himself. But it was his turn to be surprised when he heard
our price ! For, to tell the truth, we had never given a hint that we
had the intention of selling Goliath. Indeed, from now on, for some
years, we made sea-elephants a speciality of our house, one which
made more than one zoo manager envious. 'Roland, 1 who, together
with Bobby the gorilla, was the Berlin Zoo's leading attraction, was
supplied by us.

Nevertheless, it was not long before on the other side of the Atlantic
John Ringling had his own sea-elephants. He used to have one of them
Jason drawn in triumph round his three circus rings before
putting the animal in its pool. Later, he confided in me (I was staying
with him at his winter headquarters at Sarasota Bay, in Florida) that
this Jason a sea-elephant, incidentally, which we had supplied
proved of tremendous publicity value throughout the States, and more
than earned his keep during the five winter months by that daily ride
round the circus. At Sarasota Bay John Ringling had had piles driven
to make a water enclosure, so that for five months of the year Jason
could have the time of his life and fish to his heart's content in the
Gulf Stream. Even at low tide he had a sufficient depth of water for
any zoo-confined colleague to envy him.

One morning, however, this natural sea pool cost Jason dearly.
The attendant found his flippers milling as if he were training to be a
boxer. A large octopus had seized his head, and it was no easy job to
cut through the tentacles, which were a good three feet long. In this

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WE BECOME BILLIONAIRES

attack Jason lost an eye, and it was a long time before a number of
festering head wounds healed.

On this particular visit to the United States, out of thirty-four days
I was travelling for twenty-seven, for I covered the whole country.
At Memphis the heat was tropical, at Denver, there was a foot of snow
in the streets. This forced travel I found essential if I was to renew all
my old business contacts properly. The extent to which the epidemic
of national hatred could infect even educated men I had experienced
some time before this at the hands of Dr. Hornaday, director of the
New York Zoo. Immediately after the end of the war, that old
business friend had written us a letter which was an infuriated song of
hate against Germany. Just before the war we had supplied the Bronx
Park with an aurochs from Count Pless's estate. When required for
siring purposes this bull would not do his stuff. Hornaday now tried to
make out that either we or Count Pless himself had deliberately
doctored the animal to prevent America breeding from him. Later it
was established that the bull was merely suffering from an easily
treated minor complaint which any vet should have spotted at once.
But as even after that discovery the American had never felt called
upon to offer either the Count or myself an apology, I did not feel any
great inclination to call on him. He, however, heard of my presence
in New York and invited me round, and after thrashing things out
thoroughly our old friendship was restored, and I left New York
rather pleased with myself, having a new large order in my pocket.

In America I also acquired some animals for Stellingen. Among
these were four enormous alligators. When they had been got aboard
I had gone down to my cabin to change at once for breakfast, when the
bo 'sun came hurrying down to me in a state of terrible alarm, to tell
me that two of the alligators had broken loose. (He called them
crocodiles!)

I hurried off as I was, one cheek still covered with lather, and there
I saw the travelling chests in smithereens, broken up by the tails of
those powerful animals. When at last we got the hang of it all, we
found our escapees tucked away sound asleep, their heads comfortably
nestling on some old emigrants' mattresses which had been forgotten
in a corner. Carefully we closed the hold, and while I finished my
toilet and breakfasted the ship's carpenter knocked me up a sort of
shield about three feet square. This was necessary because alligators
have a tremendous bite, and once they get hold they never let go,
no matter even if their heads are twisted till the lower jaw breaks.

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ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

When the travelling boxes were built up again, I armed myself with a
lasso made from a ship's hawser. Cautiously, my stout shield in front
of me, I crept up to the sleeping monster and got my noose over the
head of the first. It woke up at once and reared up wildly, but I
quickly got the noose also over a fore leg, so as not to strangle the
animal when we pulled. The free end of the hawser had been led
through the alligator cage, and the moment I leapt back the bo'sun
and the carpenter hauled with all their might, till the animal, snapping
madly and lashing out with its tail, was safely inside.

The next alligator had watched the capture of its mate apparently
unmoved, but when I approached with shield and lasso this one lunged
forward at me, and its tooth- jagged jaws came crash on to the shield.
The blow flung me back. The alligator raised its threatening jaws a
second time, and was clearly in a combative mood. But I already had
the noose over his neck, and the next step he took was into the loop,
and he too was caught. Like lightning he now flung himself on his back
then swiftly leapt back again to his feet, doubled in two, lashing oui
with his tail on all sides, till the deck shook under the blows. But incl
by inch he too was dragged in, and when we had got him too safelj
boxed we cut the rope. Even then we did not breathe freely till the
carpenter had hammered in the last nail enclosing the creature. The
glasses of beer which we then treated ourselves to were the besi
earned I have ever known.

All this time, Richard Sawade was travelling with our mobile
circuses, partly in Germany, partly in other European countries, anc
as long as the sun shone business was good. But winter, with its
enormous costs, again drank up all the profits, for one cannot simply
lock up a circus; the performing animals must constantly be under
training. Attendants have to be paid, and repairs and preparations for
the next tour also necessitate permanent staffing.

For this reason I was now greatly concerned to find some circus
building in which to spend the winters giving performances, at least
to cover basic costs. Sarrasani owned the only building in Dresden,
Krone had his winter circus quarters in Munich, Paula Busch covered
Berlin, while in Vienna, where earlier there had been as many as three
circuses but now was none, there was now not a single suitable build-
ing available.

Guided by Father's basic motto fx oder nix that is to say, all or
nothing I then took the train for the city of the waltz. There I at
once found the housebreakers just beginning to swing their picks in

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the old Schumann building. 'Commercial Counsellor' Busch had sold
the Prater building, and this was being transformed into a cinema.
At the same time, the oldest circus building of all in Vienna, that
which Renz senior built in 1864, in the suburb of Leopoldstadt, was
apparently in ruins. There had been a fire. It had been gutted, and
what was once the dazzling foyer had been turned into a garage.
Nevertheless, I saw my chance, and resolved at once to re-convert
this ruined shell.

It was at first a baffling job. Fix oder nix was scarcely the motto of
the Viennese Hotel Industry Company, which owned the Renz ruins.
Yet at last I did manage to get them all round a table together, and
then the contract was signed Dutch gulden were to bring life into
this now slumbering circus backwater. Builders, decorators, up-
holsterers and carpenters filled the hulk with the din of their tools,
and much water and washing soda were used to remove from mangers,
auditorium and gangways a very long accumulation of filth. Could he
only have seen the red plush seats and interior decoration and dazzling
illuminations on December 6th, 1923, when once again the doors
were opened, how delighted old Renz would have been. From that
day the Viennese took us to their proverbial golden hearts and when
later our Essen building fell to the housebreakers Vienna was to pro-
vide us with a generous new home for twenty uninterrupted years.

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THE GREAT BATTLE OF STELLINGEN

IN THE autumn of 1927 came a return visit to South America, for
Hemrich's inquiries in the Buenos Aires sea-elephant market had
elicited sufficiently attractive answers. Letters and telegrams began
to fly between that southern city and Hamburg; our advance agent,
Dr. Katz, went out and one day, not long after, two men could have
been seen in Hamburg docks measuring up and chalking lines on the
deck of the s.s. General Mitre, as anxiously as old Noah had once done
on his ship. For this Hamburg-South American steamer was to be
fitted out for the transport of the entire Carl Hagenbeck Circus. When
the steamer had been chartered, and work was under way, Richard
Sawade and I took the fast train to Boulogne, to pick up a sister ship,
the Cap Norte. Sawade had originally intended to sail with our pub-
licity man, Karl Arthur Vollrath, on the Italian luxury liner Principessa
Mafalda, but he decided to join me. Vollrath, however, would not
cancel his booking. Vollrath had an expensive weakness for Italian
cooking!

So it came about that this time Hagenbeck's moved off in four
steamers we two in advance on the Cap Norte, Vollrath on the
Principessa Majalda, the General Mitre a fortnight behind us with the
animals, and our artistes and technical personnel later still on the
Billow. The two completely Hagenbeck boats were of course setting a
direct course to Buenos Aires, while our Cap Norte, plying on its
regular line, made other calls en route. However, the radio officer very
kindly flagged the daily position of our two steamers on a wall chart
for us. I came to look forward anxiously to his daily visit, and it can be
imagined what a shiver went down my spine when one day he came
with a long face and said : 'I am afraid I have sad news for you, gentle-
men.' I drew a deep breath. 'Half an hour ago/ he said gravely,
'when I made contact with the Principessa Mafalda she was sending out
an SOS. Then her radio suddenly went silent. I am afraid she has gone
down/

Sawade shot me a quick glance, and the colour left his cheeks. He
could so easily have been on that boat. But though most of the first-
and second- class passengers went down with her, it so happened that

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THE GREAT BATTLE OF STELLINGEN

Vollrath was one of the few to come out alive, but with hair turned grey ;
he had witnessed the attempt to disembark. There were too few boats,
and the sea was teeming with sharks.

Arriving in Buenos Aires, we found the city under the sign of
Hagenbeck. Dr. Katz had done good work. All possible hoarding sites
shrieked at one with their brightly coloured placards about Carlos
Hagenbeck. In any case, the people there already knew who we were.

The welcome which our learned advance agent afforded us was par-
ticularly lavish. He at once drove us off to a real feast. 'And not on the
house, either, Herr Hagenbeck/ he declared at once, 'this is all on
me,' and when I gaped, for he certainly had not been so rich when he
left Hamburg, with pride he patted a bulging note-case.

'Poker again?' I asked.

'No, 1 said Katz, 'operating theatre. 1 And thereby partly solved a
mystery. For Dr. Katz was one of the most intriguing circus men I
have ever known. Nobody hitherto had ever really believed in the
title of 'Doctor* on which he insisted, yet somehow it had always
seemed to suit him unusually well. Now it had been proved. Katz was
a person of most distinguished exterior and a most entertaining con-
versationalist. The days now flashed by, thoroughly occupied by
press conferences and parties out on the estancias of hospitable
Buenos Aires friends, till, punctually a fortnight later, there was the
General Mitre with her motley freight, and on the La Plata quays the
talk was only of Hagenbeck.

However, at the circus site we found erection of the necessary
accommodation took a little longer than it would have done in Ger-
many. Our Argentine employees spent too much time off the site.
There was a swamp not far off 'peopled* by the plumpest frogs ever
seen, and these were a culinary delicacy to the Argentinians.

However, came November 8th, 1927, at last, and we opened our
doors to a first gala performance, graced moreover by the presence
of President Dr. Alvear, who most vividly expressed his pleasure, in
the show, an official recognition to be repeated later at Rio de
Janeiro, when his Brazilian opposite number, Dr. Washington, also
attended a performance. In between one and the other expression of
the highest approval in the land lay successful performances in a long
list of the cities of both the Argentine and Brazil. Throughout South
America we followed the harvest front. Indians flocked in their
thousands to the sugar-cane provinces and earned good money. At
Tucuman, one of the twenty-seven sugar refineries made a present of

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ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

two tons of sugar-cane, which we utilised as welcome elephant fodder,
though it did not last long. Through that Cloud-cuckoo-mountain of
sweetness our twelve good Jumbos actually chewed their way in three
days, during which the corners of their mouths were constantly
dribbling nectar.

In South America, we were specially impressed by the many German
settlers, who hastened down from the most remote regions to make
festive contact under the Southern Cross with our touch of the old
home country.

Through Brazil our five-thousand-seating circus four-master was
competently steered by Richard Sawade, while I travelled that con-
tinent at large, calling on all the zoos of South America, buying ani-
mals and selling them too and eventually assembling at Buenos
Aires a substantial animal transport of ant-eating bears, ocelots,
jaguars, monkeys and a wide range of birds altogether no less than
i, 2 different specimens 1

Just before we left, I purchased one more animal pelt. It was of a
species quite unknown to me dark brown, the skin of a canine or
vulpine species and my curiosity was certainly awakened when the
dealer gave me convincing assurances that he had obtained the skin up
in the high Andes. Yet it was definitely not the hide of the long-haired
wolf, a species I knew well. With closely matted hair, it was more like
a bear's skin. At the same time, the animal had a pointed snout and
long legs. I bought the hide and thus when I returned put the cat among
the pigeons in German zoological circles, till Dr. Ingo Krummbiegel
catalogued the animal as 'the Hagenbeck Andean wolf.' Alas, despite
great efforts, I have to this day been unable to learn any more details
of this rare and so nearly extinct species, let alone obtain a living
specimen.

On the journey back to Germany, while we were calling at Santos, I
visited the world-famous San Paulo Serological Institute, and enriched
my animal collection by one hundred poisonous snakes, tortoises and
some specimens of the bird-eating spider. The Serological Institute of
Butantan has often been wrongly called a * snake farm.' However, it
does not exist to breed snakes, but to neutralise the danger of Brazil's
poisonous reptiles. Some thirty thousand poisonous snakes are sent
here every year, and the State-owned post office and railways transmit
the snakes free. The reptiles are sent in by the coffee, yerba mate and
cotton growers of this giant country, which in breadth and length
equals the distance from Hamburg to Timbuktu!

126

THE GREAT BATTLE OF STELLINGEN

Tourists from all over the world are constant visitors at the snake
compound, a grass-grown ground about a hundred yards square which
contains about a dozen squat round hutments with small entrance
holes at ground level. Here creep deadly reptiles in their thousands.
One can see Brazil's deadliest snakes coiled up in the grass, creeping
in or out of their huts, or trying in vain to climb the polished, over-
hanging cement-faced walls of their compound.

Totally unconcerned, among them strides the most photographed
man of Brazil, in thigh-high rubber boots, and while onlookers get the
creeps he calmly pins the creatures down with a wooden fork, picks
them up with a grip behind the head, and with pincettes neatly
squeezes the poison sac out into a test-tube.

The director showed me over hi laboratory, where the milked-out
poison is dehydrated and pulverised. To get one ounce of dehydrated
poison, the sacs of more than eight hundred snakes are required. Small
doses injected into the blood-stream of horses kept under ideal con-
ditions, on the best food, of course, and under strictest controls
produce poison antibodies, and at long intervals this serum is ex-
tracted and prepared, for supply to outlying farmers in ampoules
ready for home use. In the particular year I was there it was a farmer
of the state of Santa Catharina who had beaten the record, sending in
four hundred and ninety-nine snakes.

'Would you like to see a genuine snake banquet?' the director
laughed. He thrust his arm into a chest and from this produced a
poisonless adder, glistening black, and about eight feet in length.
Apparently this was his pet. He took it into his lap and stroked its
head, as if it were a lap-dog. Using long-handled pincers, his assistant
now put a very dangerous lachesis on the floor, and like a dart the
adder leapt on this and, after a brief struggle, despite the lachesis 's
attempts to bite the adder, had this by the head, and then with satis-
faction slowly imbibed it. After this apparently ample meal the doctor
took his pet back on his lap, but now the little head, eagerly darting
from side to side, clearly expressed a wish for 'more of that,' and this
was in fact served, in the shape of a poisonous coral adder, which was
just as readily swallowed down.

But despite all the serum which the Institute is today able to send to
all parts of Brazil, it has still discovered nothing satisfactory against the
bite of the bird-eating spider, which is capable of killing a sixteen-
stone man in twenty minutes.

I have only known one man who had a feeling almost of affection for

127

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

this deadly member of the Gramostola family, and that was our own
Papa Dorries, at Stellingen, who died a few years ago at the ripe age of
a hundred and one, and had for long been in charge of our insect house.
My brother and I had all our lives been on the most intimate terms with
Papa Dorries, for he had been a friend of our father's, his childhood
playmate in those far-off days when Hamburg was entirely enclosed
within its city walls. He often used to tell us how they came back home
late, when the city gates were closed, and, having no money to pay the
fine, were given a few 'of the best' with the sentry's halberd.

Papa Domes, an outstanding insect expert, thus served three
generations of our family. He had spent twenty-five years collecting
butterflies, beetles and insects for us. In Siberia, in Japan, and on the
island of Sakhalin, he had turned his open umbrella upside down and
tapped the bushes to capture what he wanted, discovering hundreds of
new species of insect, many of which are now known to science by the
names he gave them. He acquired his great love for the world of minute
creatures from his own father, a Hamburg master baker in public life
but in private life a scholar who had closely worked with the famous
naturalist Dr. Alfred Brehm. He had many a tale to tell of his early
adventures in East Siberia.

In 1 877 Papa Dorries served as steward on the first steamer to go to
Nagasaki from Hamburg, a voyage of seventy-five days. He had then
traversed the whole of Japan from south to north on foot. Thence he
continued through Sakhalin to Vladivostok and to East Siberia,which
country absorbed him for no less than twenty-five years. When he
thought he had had enough of that life, in addition to a collection of
Siberian tigers, reindeer and stags, he had eighty-seven thousand
butterflies and beetles, five thousand six hundred stuffed birds, count-
less pelts and a great deal of folk information regarding the Tungus,
Funfu and Aino peoples, all of which has enriched Germany's museums
and preserved his name for posterity. Back in Germany, and already
getting on in years, he now spent twenty-five years in charge of the
Stellingen Terrarium and Aquarium, where the Kaiser and more than
one other crowned head were his visitors and marvelled at the way in
which he would pick up those death-dealing spiders.

Fritz Dorries was as trusting in his attitude towards the animal
world as he was honourable and guileless in his dealings with men.
He would slide back the glass cover to the dangerous spider's cage,
breathe on the creature, gently stroke its back, then cautiously lift it
out. He would then carefully turn it on to its back on the palm of his

128

A giant of the jungle holds her foot with $ tons weight behind it-
over her trainer's head, but little Uwe does not fear for his father; he
knows he himself can handle the gentle Roma

Aquatic delights in Stcllingen's elephant pool : ample water and .1 good
mud wallow are essentials in an elephant's toilet

Lulu Gautier on his Lipizzaner mount Favoy Maestoso

THE GREAT BATTLE OF STELLINGEN

hand, so that sightseers, holding their breath, could see the unholy
little poisoner's powerful incisors.

Dorries was convinced that all the animals knew his body smell. He
never touched them without first rinsing his hands well in warm water,
so that there would be only his natural body odour, and not the
slightest trace of soap, on his hands.

He fed the bird-eating spiders with cockroaches, but every fort-
night, as a treat, he used to give them a mouse. I have many a time
watched those feasts. Like lightning, the spider would rise on its hairy
legs on to the mouse, give it one bite, then leap back. Immediately a
spasmodic jerk would run through the mouse, and a few seconds later
it would be dead, when the spider would devour it completely, only
skin and bones being left.

One day, however, D6rries nearly had a bad accident, which might
easily have had catastrophic results. But 'Papa' never for an instant lost
his unassailable calm or his confidence in his poisonous little friend.
He had been showing it to a famous princess and her attendants, and
these, their noses wrinkled with disgust, were turning to follow the
gentlemen of the party when the then fashionable head scarf of one of
the ladies happened to touch the spider. In a flash this had leapt on to it
and taken up a position on the top of the lady's straw hat. She had no
idea what had happened, but it only needed a careless move of her
hand for a fatal accident to have taken place. Without a word, Dorries
quickly slipped behind her, took the escapee carefully down from its
elevated perch and put it back into its glass case 1

Later, Heinrich and I threatened all our animal attendants with
immediate dismissal if any of them failed to observe the precautions
prescribed for work in handling the animals. Unfortunately, nearly all
men who have to handle animals every day of their lives tend to become
too trustful, for everyday contact with danger leads inevitably to in-
difference. Most accidents with animals have only one cause lack of
caution on the part of the victim.

Thus, one of Richard Sa wade's attendants, no doubt wanting in his
boss's absence to show off to an audience, dared to enter the carni-
vores' cage with only a brush and shovel. Before the eyes of the on-
lookers the man was torn to pieces on the spot.

A similar case was that of a certain retired bank employee. To
please him, he was given a summer job by Father as a park attendant.
During the season we always needed a large number of auxiliary men
to keep people from running over the grass lawns, picking flowers, or

129

9 AML

AWMALS ARE MY LIFE

climbing over the barriers. This retired bank clerk had often seen my
father go into the lion pit unarmed, but the unfortunate man was
apparently ignorant that the tamest lion turns into a wild beast the
instant a stranger approaches it with stick or whip in hand. That is
just what this unfortunate man did. He took a whip from its hook in
the ante-room and, alcohol-brave, entered the pit. Immediately a
male lion rushed at him, knocking him down. He yelled loudly, and
the lion shook him as a terrier will shake a rat. The fact that this lion,
which we had bought from the Balfertein Menagerie, had had its teeth
filed flat and that the bank clerk had on a thick winter coat allowed
us to hope that the man's life might still be saved.

Alarmed by the cries of the visitors who were present, Heinrich
rushed to the spot. At the same time one of our nephews raced to the
office and brought out one of the revolvers which we kept ready to be
used with blank cartridges. The attendant meanwhile had got the
other lions into the inner compartment, but the old male was still
gripping his victim, growling all the time. Without taking aim,
Heinrich fired at close range. To his horror, the lion staggered away,
as if hit.

The fact was, with the best of intentions, the lad had loaded with a
live cartridge, but had not warned Heinrich that he had done so. My
brother, of course, was now afraid lest he had also wounded the man.
The lion had dropped him, and he now lay lifeless.

The lion crept away into the inner cage, and the bank clerk was
carried out. There was a doctor to hand, but, though he was rela-
tively unhurt by the lion's teeth, the bank clerk was past medical aid.
Shaking him, the animal had banged his head against the concrete
floor and smashed in his skull. Heinrich' s bullet had indeed hit the
lion, and I was obliged to put the animal out of its pain with my heavy
hunting gun. Thus through sheer lack of elementary caution on his own
part a man lost his life, and so did one of the sweetest- tempered lions
which we had ever had. The animal had been such a pet that the little
son of his former tamer had regularly ridden him about the yard as if
he were a rocking-horse.

The relatives of the former bank clerk now claimed substantial
damages, but without result, for the court accepted the evidence that
all our employees were strictly forbidden to cross the barriers put up
to keep visitors out of danger, unless in the company of the tamer or
trainer specifically detailed to handle any particular animal.

In these years my family saw me only as an occasional guest at our

130

THE GREAT BATTLE OF STELLINGEN

new house at Lokstedt. Two younger men were absorbing a lot of my
time both in the office and the animal park, for they were learning
the business. They were both called Carl after their grandfather
and while one also bore the second name of Heinrich, after his father,
the other was my own son, Carl Lorenz. They were to follow us in the
firm. Carlo and Heinchen, as they had been called since infancy, were
one heart and one soul, a most important point for any enterprise in
which two partners have equal responsibilities and rights.

For all my own father's good intentions and contrivances I had
always in all respects inevitably been rather in the shade of Heinrich,
who was seven years my senior, and had so much more experience in
the firm. Though in the end we did come to work together always in
the greatest harmony, there were by the nature of things bound to be
differences of basic outlook between us. I remember one time when
our discussion in the head office reached such a point o( fortissimo that
it was our two wives as close friends as any blood sisters could have
been who had the job of pouring sufficient oil on to the troubled
waters. I cannot tell you how contentedly, after this process, their
replete husbands puffed at their cigars and chatted about nothing
in particular 1

Here, however, let me remove any misconception. I cannot em-
phasise too much that Heinrich and I never ceased to drive hard to-
wards the same goal. Our differences were never more than about how
to get there, and even when we were silver-haired we had many a
tussle about that sort of thing. We both had inherited my father's pig-
headedness. We also both had powerful fists, and as the debate waxed,
so did the blows on our desks, till the ink-pots danced.

There was, however, one occasion on which we actually found our-
selves in conflict as leaders of opposing armies, though this was not
occasioned by any difference of opinion of our own. But let me intro-
duce the 'armies.' In a corner of the park we had a party of Bedouins
encamped in their tents. My nephew Heinrich had devised pyramids,
a sphinx and some mosques, to produce a really Egyptian backcloth to
this scene, which included a 'native bazaar,' inclusive of memento stall
and a display of picture postcards, a business which flourished when-
ever the proud sons of the desert were not distracting the Hamburg
folk's attention by their riding displays.

Not far from here a contingent of Somali folk had erected their own
mud huts. Here our orthodox Moslem friend Hersy Egeh ruled over
his tribe, and when these were not enacting war dances or dromedary

131

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

races or grilling mutton over open fires as part of the programme,
they were busy selling 'black sugar-cane* to the gaping visitors. This
sugar-cane was for chewing, and I may remark that it combined the
functions of a tooth-brush and chewing gum, two concepts still
unknown in Somaliland, though our good Somalis also sold picture
postcards quite well. Here in fact was the potential cause of a bitter
trade war, and one morning this did break out in all earnest.

Suddenly the animal park rang with war-cries. The women began
to shriek and blows rained down on turbans and fuzzy Somali heads
alike, while Heinrich and I, unbeknownst to each other and by differ-
ent paths, rushed to the scene and from different sides I Hence Hein-
rich appeared in the Somali village, while I took my place among the
Bedouins I We pressed through the crowd on either side till through
showers of stones we reached the scene of the mlee. Not one man
paid the least attention to our words, or rather, they paid the wrong
sort of attention, for each side apparently took our presence in their
midst and our shouting as approval, support, even leadership.

For a few moments the battle grew still fiercer, now that each side
was led by one of the white chiefs. That tried our patience, till, seeing
each other, we were able to combine our efforts, bringing our sticks
down lustily on whatever heads came under them, till at last, with
Hersy Egeh's valiant support, we secured peace. The Bedouins were
the first to lay down arms, and as we now discovered that they had
also been the first to take them up, we suggested they might like a
little sightseeing trip round Hamburg. Scenting baksheesh, they ex-
pressed their readiness, and in the little tour we included a 'visit to a
steamship.' Once we had got them on board that, we made very sure
they did not get ashore again. In short, we dispatched them back
whence they had come in very short order, and from then on had
peace in the park.

Such was the Battle of Stellingen, totally ignored by all manuals of
history, since it proved possible to smooth things out merely with
walking-sticks.

It went without saying that when peoples from far-distant, out-of-
the-way corners of the world made their first contact with large
European cities, there were many strange incidents. There was that
awkward moment when Heimich's satisfaction with some brave Sioux
was somewhat clouded by finding his favourite household pet Flora
grilling over their camp fire. One man's meat was clearly another

132

THE GREAT BATTLE OF STELLINGEN

man's poison or vice versa. But we found Hersy Egeh and his men on
the whole a pleasure to work with.

During this particular summer stay in Hamburg, Hersy Egeh gave
expression to his desire to see his pet son Ali receive some measure of
German schooling, and the nearest and most suitable place for him to
get knowledge which would be useful at home seemed to be our
Stellingen primary school. So there young Ali went, and readers can
imagine the excitement he caused when he sat side by side with my
nephews and nieces on the school benches. He was a bright lad, spoke
Low German like any other real Stellingen urchin, and there were
many occasions when his homework was shown to the whole class as
an example of how to do it.

But his school career ended sharply. He was living as a member of
my brother's family, and had he not been too forthcoming and too
interested in Heinrich's revolver perhaps he would have got further.
But on one occasion, when he had been left alone in the house, he
wanted to play the hero no doubt so that we should all praise him
and reward him. So he staged a burglary which he was supposed to
have prevented, and to make it all the more realistic he fabricated
visible signs of the struggle and as conclusive evidence of the in-
glorious business concealed Heinrich's gold watch. My brother heard
Ali's Oriental story of armed bandits to the end in utter amazement,
but despite the boy's many convincing gestures and eloquent descrip-
tion he had his doubts. Indeed, the doubts became so great that
eventually he put Ali over his knees and gave him a good Hamburg
dusting, whereupon howling Ali confessed everything, and with a
broken elementary school career travelled back to Africa, where for
years after he puzzled Hamburg captains bunkering at Djibuti by his
Hamburg eloquence.

Shortly before the outbreak of the war we had our last message
from him from a ship's captain, and I was genuinely pleased a little
after this to have a long letter from him. Now the proud father of a
substantial troop of children, he sent me some snapshots. His own
much lamented father, Hersy Egeh, had died some years previously,
and with him the age of the proud chiefs of those parts vanished for
ever. As business man equipped with foreign tongues, Ali now wore a
smart double-breasted suit, but it was clear that he still hankered after
the old days of his childhood at Stellingen, when he used to edify the
young bloods of Hamburg with his wild war-dances.

Somewhere in the South Seas there must also be a coffee-skinned

'33

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

beauty who, by bearing a birth certificate with the rubber stamp of
Stellingen parish council, must have puzzled many an official of her
own far-off island. This Kanaka girl was born in our park on July 2 ist,
1931, when our very last party from New Caledonia were dancing
their hula-hula dances. She herself was to be better at the foxtrot. As
a matter of fact, whenever they danced we had to rig out these Melane-
sians with their national costumes, making them up on the model of
those in the Hamburg Museum, and I very much doubt if their grand-
fathers would ever have ventured to sea among the coral reefs in the
canoes which they cobbled up for our shows. When performances
were over for the day, they all dressed in ordinary European clothes
and went out to Hamburg's Reeperbahn for their own recreation.

The original simple life, the hand-fashioning of native weapons and
tools, the tribal festivals and customs, all those things which made the
earlier of our great folk exhibitions so attractive to people all that
was already gone. Progress cannot be halted, the wheel of history
allows no reversal. Radio, the press and above all the cinema have
touched the remotest corners of the world, including those from
which our exhibitions came. Once upon a time the journey to Ham-
burg had been the greatest adventure in the life of Eskimos, Tierra del
Fuegans and Australian aborigines, one from which they returned
home with their minds enlarged, the envy of their fellows, but the last
of these peoples to come to Hamburg had more or less been merely so
many show artistes offering a programme. Thus that cheerful little
'folk-wandering* which for fifty years had given Europeans a concrete
idea of what other far-off peoples had looked like and had taken our
name to the igloos of Greenland, the tepees of Alaska and the pile-
dwellings of the South Seas was over.

While Heinrich devoted himself principally to developing the animal
park and the animal supply business which depended on this, I looked
after oversea enterprises, handled circus work and to use the charm-
ing business expression travelled 'in animals.' Thus it was that during
one of my many North American journeys in the rising motor-car
town of Detroit, where thousands were already working on Henry
Ford's conveyor belt, I came upon an old acquaintance. Ten years had
changed him too, but his unusual tie-pin disposed of any doubt. It
was John Millen, our old Stellingen ostrich farm manager.

John Millen imparted a piece of news which made me prick up my
ears, namely Detroit was thinking of creating its own zoo. There were
enough dollars available, all that lacked was the man to plan it and the

134

THE GREAT BATTLE OF STELLINGEN

man to manage it. Ah, those were lacks which could soon be filled!
We hired a car at once and did a round of the city fathers, in which I
did not fail to speak in praise of 'an American with zoo experience
named John Millen,' with reference to Stellingen and to all the zoos
we had founded in both Europe and America. In due course Millen
did become manager of the Detroit Zoo, and the firm of Carl Hagen-
beck got the job of construction and the supply of animals !

The following year, Heinrich himself went to Detroit to complete
the plans for and supervise the construction of the various free animal
compounds. We supplied all the animals, and the only slip-up was that
on the opening day the polar bears strolled out to meet the public. In
fact, Heinrich had refused responsibility for this particular detail, the
bear-pit, which had been ready when he took over, with a protective
moat so narrow that my boy Carlo, out there with his uncle, could
leap it without any great effort. Such a jump was of course nothing
for a polar bear, and it was indeed lucky that those who did get across
were only young animals and nobody was hurt. Today the Detroit
Zoo, which since then has been enlarged, is considered one of the
loveliest in the United States.

THE DEVIL DANCERS CAPTURE SCANDINAVIA

IN THE spring of 1929 the s.s. Parana brought our circus back to
Hamburg from Brazil. Personal pleasure at seeing Richard Sawade and
many of our old employees again was, however, rather overshadowed
by the bad business outlook in Germany. The Young Plan lay like a
nightmare on our country. From 1930 to 1988 we were to pay
60,000 million Reichsmarks, which with interest and interest on
interest meant over 100,000 million marks. From every advertise-
ment site, placards showed us grandfather, father and son together
pulling the family plough weighed down by War Guilt. It expressed
both the mood and the position of Germany. As for circuses, it was
easy to assess our position by the terrible rivalry which had developed
between Sarrasani, Krone, Busch, Strassburger, Gleich Althoff and
ourselves, to name only the largest. We were fighting each other for
strictly limited available gate money. With particular fierceness flared
the battle round that publicity-powerful superlative, * Germany 9 s
Biggest Circus,' an expensive ambition which had never really ruled us
at Stellingen. Who was going to be so silly as to estimate Hagenbeck's
enterprises by the number of their wagons, animals or man-power?
Had not Carl Zuckmayer written : 'In Hagenbeck's the circus pure of
classical antiquity lives on, a cultural institution, just as the Kroll
Opera or Reinhardt's productions once were, and as noble a passion
as any great national festival.'

Neck and neck in this chase after the superlative were Hans Stosch-
Sarrasani and Carl Krone. Addressing the beloved inhabitants of the
town to which he had come, with the pathos of a tribune of the people
Hans Stosch would compose his whole-page newspaper ads, and he
would flood whole districts with twopence-coloured adventure book-
lets telling the young folk wonderful things about the Maharaja of the
Ring and his elephant herd. He ran his own publicity aircraft, mainly
highly unsafe fighter aircraft of the first world war, which banked
dangerously round church spires or flew under river bridges. In
short, he made himself the European Barnum of advertisement
publicity.

Carl Krone gave him tit for tat, with all the confidence moreover

136

THE DEVIL DANCERS CAPTURE SCANDINAVIA

of an enterprise which was brilliantly run, both technically and from a
business standpoint. But neither all this nor the costly lawsuits to
which the outstanding big bosses resorted in their circus-like battle
could really decide which was the biggest circus in Germany.

Here let me put in a quiet word of explanation for the layman : the
* bigness* of a circus can be measured in various ways. One is the
seating provided by the big top, which is not to be measured purely in
square feet of tent space, since there is a wide range of difference be-
tween systems of seating. Nor is the number of people employed, or
animals, or wagons the criterion, for these figures vary with the items
on the bill and change from season to season. One cannot even judge
by the total area a circus occupies. Rolling-stock can be parked tight
packed or well spaced. Besides, when it comes to that, even white
mice can be a big circus attraction, so that the mere number of the
animals means nothing whatever by itself. The question indeed would
never have found an agreed touchstone were it not that municipal
authorities tend to put one single test forward when rival advance
agents apply for permission to visit a town. 'How many elephants
have you got?' they ask, on the supposition that the possession of
those giant animals is a safe indication of the worth of an enterprise.
But even here one had not finished with rivalries. For, when they were
suddenly thus put in demand, we sold Jumbos like hot cakes, till both
rival shows were carting round with them the * biggest elephant herd in
Europe.' If one spoke of twenty beasts, the other at once bought its
twenty-first, even if it were only a stunted baby thing. The principal
desideratum was that the animal should have a trunk and be designated
'elephant.'

We began to feel sorry for our opposite numbers, and with the
assistance of a neutral Berlin theatrical agency Heinrich at last invited
them both to a little party, and after a very good spread the hatchet
was buried in cigar smoke. Sarrasani, who had toured South America
on Hugo Stinnes' loans and in Hugo Stinnes' ships, from then on
advertised himself as 'The loveliest show of the two worlds,' while
Carl Krone, who had never been out of Europe, agreed to call his
circus 'Europe's biggest.' And so it remained, till these two devotees
of the circus were no longer in this world.

Before these two biggest circus managers ended their little war,
the s.s. Parana discharged her cargo in Hamburg docks, and we raised
our own big top over the Hamburg Heiligengeist Field. Beside the big
tent we had used in South America we erected another, a rather smaller

137

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

one, for the animal show. All our stabling tents were ranged round the
sides of a big open square, within which we could tether forty-one
elephants. This herd was made up of the animals of both our circus
programmes and the Stellingen Animal Park, which had just been
enriched by a new contingent from India. That elephant assembly was
an imposing sight, not without its publicity value in daily and weekly
press. But it was only a momentary demonstration for the official
elephant counters. After our opening shows at Hamburg, our larger
enterprise went to Scandinavia and the smaller to Holland, and then
we resumed at once our practice of taking with us only just as many
elephants as we required for pure circus work. But in the initial dis-
play we also showed elephants which we generally used solely for
loading purposes, including them as the Bunder-men* in the final
'pyramid', the item in which the elephants march out, each with its
front feet on the back of the one in front. We also showed some
African bull elephants, which later had to be withdrawn, for when on
heat it is too dangerous to let elephant bulls come into a circus. When
we paraded through the streets we always took great precautions
against accidents.

Circus managers have an additional worry, which they share with
captains of ships. They too are dependent on wind and foul weather
and every day you will see their eyes anxiously watching the tops of
the tent poles, which are capped with pennants which give an idea
of the force of the wind. Since the introduction of weather- warning
systems, our enterprise was a regular subscriber, and thus, getting
timely knowledge of approaching gales, we were often able to take
proper precautions.

But when we were just about to set out on our Scandinavian trip, it
was not wind, but frost, which kept us at Stellingen day after day.
Everything was ready, but artistes and tent men alike had to cool their
heels, for day in, day out, our advance men reported frost, so hard
that there could be no thought of erecting a tent one could never
have driven in the tent irons.

At last, however, the news came through: it was thawing. Out
steamed our trains. Working at great stress, our men erected our tents
at Malmo in record time. The first night was an enormous success.
Spurred by malicious newspaper reception, every man strove to give
his very best to secure support, and Malmo was most enthusiastic. A
success like that was noised abroad, and when they saw our bills the
country folk of the agricultural province of Schonen simply poured in.

138

THE DEVIL DANCERS CAPTURE SCANDINAVIA

Hagenbeck? Yes, that was something they had heard of, that was the
German circus which all Malmo had hastened to see.

One day, however, I could scarce believe my eyes. Before my eyes I
saw a quite small circus come in, and slyly put up its bills neatly under
ours. Impudence which cost them nothing, for they were getting all
the advantage of the publicity for which we had paid. Many good folk
who went into that smaller tent were certainly rather surprised, for
our bills promised items very different from what these little folk
offered. But a circus war abroad can be a two-edged sword, and there
was only one sensible thing to do: beat them to it. In any smallish
town it was no use waiting for the quality of a programme to become
its own publicity. One's first house must be filled by one's own
advance advertisement. So : full speed ahead ! And in one night we put
a good fifty miles between ourselves and that small circus, and after
that everything went well. Linkoping, Norrkoping, Nykoping. On
we went with our Wanderings with Man and Beast as our good friend
Paul Eipper called his favourite book. He had spent three weeks
travelling round with us in perfect bliss, and every page of that book
breathes the whole spirit of the sawdust ring. An animal-lover with
the eyes of a poet, during this Swedish tour he discovered the real
romance of a circus on the road.

Meanwhile I had gone to Holland, to look after our other enterprise,
bringing back with me a few items with which I intended to enrich
our Scandinavian programme when we reached Stockholm, which is a
'difficult' town, its people reserved and exacting. In addition, there
was a Swedish circus manager who seemed to forget that he had once
brought his circus to Germany, for he now filled the local press with
cries of protest that we should ever have come to Sweden. In any case,
cinema and theatre entrepreneurs are no circus-lovers, and of course, as
permanent advertisers in the local press, they have a certain press pull.

No matter, what could the heroes of screen or stage do against our
stalwart swart-headed Somali warriors? What were silent film close-
ups against the profound, heart-stirring beat of the drums which
accompanied the fantastic leaps of our Indian devil dancers? The
exotic romanticism of our big top with all its lights, the roar of the
lions, the trumpeting of the elephants and the hoarse snarls of the
royal tigers broke through Stockholm's ice. There had been no big
circus in the city for thirteen years it was in 1913 that we had
played there last and the folk streamed in their thousands to our
performances.

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

We made a discovery. The Stockholm Folk Museum still had a
silver-plated sword, a hippopotamus-hide shield, a brightly coloured
straw mat and a set of earthenware pottery which Hersy Egeh, then
chief of our twenty-three Habraval warriors, had proudly presented
to Professor Lindblom. Here, now, in the North African section, the
old chief came upon a picture which made him most excited, for it
was of a young Somali chief bursting with vigour. 'But that is me ! ' he
cried, his kindly face beaming all over, and in his broken English he
explained that this picture had been taken at the Somaliland exhibition
i n London thirty-four years before 1 Pride to find himself thus pre-
served in this temple of knowledge suffused Hersy 's black features.

We played at Stockholm for a month, but by that time the protests
had run all the way up the ladder to the top, and, lest the circus take
too much money out of the town, the municipal authorities terminated
our permit.

In the friendly small town of Vesteros we had another battle of the
peoples, this time between denizens of India and Africa twenty-
three Somalis on the one hand, twenty-one Indians on the other. Both
parties had the right to sell postcards of their peoples on the circus
ground, a profitable undertaking, apart from the fact that such a sale of
postcards helped towards the rapprochement of black and white. But an
Indian lad was said to have seduced a customer from the Africans, and
it came to blows, both sides using spears and clubs. There was a
pitched battle, the contestants egged on by their womenfolk. They
fought with whatever they could lay hands on.

Of course, our permanent staff separated them as soon as they could,
but not before three men had been taken to hospital. But we did suc-
ceed in restoring order before the Swedish police arrived on the
scene, and that was fortunate. As a precaution, I disarmed both
parties and locked the weapons in a truck. But that was far from being
the end of it. The Indians had a spokesman, and he made a great
speech on the surface formal and European, but very Indian under-
neath. They required me within twenty-four hours to decide whiqh
party was to stay. There was no room for them both. I had no inten-
tion of giving way to this, so I lined them up in the paddock and made
my own little speech, pointing out that we were not in Sweden to
fight each other, but to earn money, all of us. Hersy too contributed
a speech, with his men repeating whole phrases after him, after which
they went boldly up to the Indians and offered them their hands. The
leader of the Indians now felt it his turn to make a speech. His name,

140

THE DEVIL DANCERS CAPTURE SCANDINAVIA

in the books, was nothing less than Kiriwakkewagederanaida, and
Kiriwakkewagederanaida demanded a postcard sales demarcation line.
Speeches continued. Hersy, for instance, told a young Indian orator
that he had dandled him as a baby in South America. But if they had
time for endless debate, I had not, so I divided the circus into two
parts, as far as postcard sales went, and laid it down that they were to
take turns at the better site. Bravo ! Peace was declared at last !

I should, however, record that such conflicts were so rare that
these two which I have recounted here are in fact the only ones that I
recall. The Oriental peoples were always particularly well behaved.
Indeed, many a European circus performer might take an example
from them. The Chinese and Japanese were in fact most dignified,
and lived so withdrawn into their families that it was a delight to work
with them.

At Oslo one day I had two boxes decorated with the Norwegian
colours, and punctually at four an automobile drew up, from which
emerged tall King Haakon and his party, which included an English
princess and her husband, their two fair-haired children and their
young equerry. Despite the terrible downpour of rain, the gentlemen
were wearing bowler hats. That, however, was so usual in Norway that
one could even see workmen going to work in them.

Before he led the way into his box, King Haakon shook my hand.
During the performance he laughed heartily at the antics of our clown
and clapped his friendly approval. Our animals too did their best, as
if they knew they were going to delight a king with their art an
occasion which today has become more rare in the world. Neverthe-
less that clumsy lout our African elephant Safari would insist on
squirting a trunkful of sand at the Royal Box. That certainly did not
please, though it was soon forgotten, for the team of ten of which he
was one caused real delight.

The next king whose hand I was to shake was Fuad of Egypt. My
son Carlo and I received him in state at the main gate of Stellingen, A
lively exchange of conversation developed as I showed Fuad round,
with the result. that the same year Carlo was able to bring the first
living Abu Markub from Egypt, i.e., the 'father of the shoe,' or shoe
stork.

In this same year we received from the Arctic and Antarctic, from
Alaska and Africa, large contingents of animals for Stellingen: ten
walruses from Greenland, four hundred and forty hooded baboons
from Abyssinia, Fritz Essler for the eighth time brought sea-elephants

141

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

and king and gold-crest penguins from the Antarctic, while Heinrich's
efforts in Alaska led to the arrival of the first giant bears (Ursus
middendorfi meriam) from the Alaskan island of Kodiak. This bear
weighed 2,640 Ib. and was over nine feet high when erect.

For a few days a new twelve-foot-long giant shark (Selache maxima L.)
brought Hamburg folk out to Stellingen. This big fish weighed four
tons. It had been caught on the Atlantic coast. One of the nets of a St.
Pauli fishing boat had fouled its gills, much to the subsequent delight
of our polar bears, who derived nicely rounded tummies therefrom.

Nearly every day I had to interrupt my desk work at Stellingen,
and my poor secretary used to sigh whenever she heard that so-and-so
had arrived among my visitors were the curator of the Parisian
Jardin des Plantes, Henny Porten the actress, the commander of the
Argentinian training ship President* Sarmiento, and Prince Takamatsu of
Japan.

Fortunately, however, both we 'old fellows' now had a son to take
some of the burden on his shoulders, or, should I say, on his younger
feet, for one or other of them would be dispatched to do the eight-
mile walk through the animal park, showing the sights. The alleys
were now tortuous and long, but I could have described them in my
sleep, and I, like any good museum guide, answered all the questions
which nearly everybody asked at the same points, whether they came
from Toronto or Johannesburg, from Sydney or Hammerfest. At
Stellingen, they all became 'animal-lovers.' That made the real
specialist all the more welcome a visitor. He did not ask, as all the
others did, whether zebras were striped black on white or white on
black, or if it was true that ostriches stick their heads in the sand.

The fair sex understand the animal world entirely after their own
fashion, by a system much simpler and of greater antiquity than that
of Linnaeus. They divide them into pretty animals and ugly animals,
though I would add that the dividing line fluctuates according to some
sort of fashion law. I remember a charming young lady from Vienna,
whom I was showing round, clapping her hands wildly when we came
to the elephants and crying: 'Oh, do look, Herr Hagenbeck, what a
darling little Jumbo that one is 1 * ' Yet this was an old bull elephant,
weighing a good three-quarters of a ton.

The creatures at Stellingen which most often get stroked, sur-
prisingly enough, are two large snakes. The reptiles I mean, of course,
are the giant bronze fountain snakes at the foot of the high Alpine
Panorama ! Here, years back, we had once had two snakes who fought

142

THE DEVIL DANCERS CAPTURE SCANDINAVIA

so over a piece of food that they got tied in a knot and fell into the
water and were drowned. That inspired Joseph Pallenberg to make a
bronze depiction of the battle, and as nearly everybody feels he has to
caress these heads and bodies the reptiles are always beautifully
polished.

Everywhere at Stellingen you would always see visitors, and one
could have embraced each of them, for it was their steady patronage
which made it possible to carry out our dreams. At the same time,
there were other moments when one could have let oneself loose on
them with a good cudgel, such as the occasion when we found a valu-
able sea-elephant dead in his pool through having swallowed a small
bottle which a visitor had thrown away in the water.

As a class, it is our farming folk who are the visitors I respect most.
No farmer would ever think of giving an ice to animals which eat
herbage, or throw an apple to the sea-lions, or expect a lion to stand
ten hours a day roaring and lashing its tail in the sun and pacing up and
down, just because he happened to have taken it into his head to spend
an idle afternoon moment passing by.

Our country folk still have a natural understanding of the animal
world, which unfortunately inhabitants of large towns have quite
forgotten. The townsman demands entertainment and compels us to
pro vide him with so-called amenities which have nothing whatsoever to
do with a zoo as such. All the same, after the first world war Heinrich
and I resolved never to open the so-called amusements park again. In
its stead we introduced our children's circus, which under our worthy
assistant Emil Kohrmann has in its twenty-five years* existence won a
firm place in the hearts of our younger generation.

In this circus, children act for children. There are ponies from
our pony stud and numerous young animals to show their tricks.
Today it is 'Uncle EmilY son and grandson who are carrying on the
tradition.

Like a giant magnet, the 1931 Colonial Exhibition in Paris drew
streams of people out to Vincennes. It included peoples from all
parts of the French colonial empire, from Cochin- China, Morocco,
Madagascar and Tunis, with their houses, their ships and also their
domestic animals. In comparison with the American world exhibitions,
here one felt the much more artistic hand of the French. From the
finest flowers of their colonial realm (the second in extent in the

'43

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

world), they certainly had made a lovely garland, a delight to the eye
of the foreign visitor.

Round miniature Lake Daumesnil, the island on which was trans-
formed to an enchanted islet straight out of the Thousand and One
Nights, were grouped pagodas from Laos, mosques from Syria, while
those who had never seen the ruins of the mighty Angkor- Vat temple
in the Cambodian jungle could marvel at a reconstruction of them
which was in itself a monument to French architects. But when people
had feasted their eyes on all these wonders, they streamed into the
Colonial Zoo, which after the pattern of Stellingen my brother
Heinrich had equipped with lakes and rocks and populated with a
trainload of animals.

It had not been an easy matter, for if we uprooted a single tree at
Vincennes, we were liable to a penalty of ten thousand francs. It was
only by dint of much negotiation that we were allowed to remove one
single trunk which made it impossible to construct the large-scale
elephant compound properly. Originally, Heinrich had asked the
French to foot the building bill, while we were to supply the animals
at our cost. The idea was that, after covering food and watering costs,
the gate money should be divided between the exhibition manage-
ment and ourselves. However, this proposal was not accepted, for the
French wished to make the Colonial Zoo a special bonus extra of the
exhibition, to be seen without any special entrance charge. So we
were to be paid an inclusive fee for our work and the supply of all the
animals.

However, in practice, such masses of people poured into our part
of the show that there was some fear lest visitors would press beyond
the barriers into the animal enclosures, so overnight, in the interests of
safety, the management decided to rail off the Colonial Zoo and cut
down the attendance there by a special charge. When the exhibition
was over, we received a very courteous letter of gratitude from the
Paris Municiplity, which intimated that, after deduction of all costs,
the zoo alone had brought in six million francs !

The Colonial Zoo remained open three years longer, then it was
decided on the same model to construct the big new Pare Zoologique
du Bois de Vincennes, and this, beside the older Jardin des Plantes
and the Jardin d* Acclimatisation, is the loveliest animal park in
France.

In the thirties, right through to the outbreak of the second world
war, the word 'construction' was writ large for us at Stellingen. In

144

Mosques and Singhalese villages at Stellingen. Such accurate reconstruc-
tions formed the background to our famous shows of Peoples ol the World.
Here we see Arabs outside a typical 'oasis town'

Below: A dwarf zebu in harness in a typical village scene. In this
e than one early German film was made

'Black on white. 1

THE DEVIL DANCERS CAPTURE SCANDINAVIA

fact, the large four-part African Panorama had (apart from the Arctic
show) been the only cageless animal compound carried through com-
pletely to Father's ideas. Now Heinrich built the 'Asia' section, a
landscape divided into wet and dry covered-in portions, in which, past
water-birds, antelopes, zebus and yaks, one had a view in the back-
ground of a great free compound for elephants and rhinoceros. This
layout was later to serve many foreign zoos as model for their own
arrangements, but none has ever surpassed the Stellingen original in
beauty or practical effectiveness. In 1931 the Prague Zoo was con-
structed according to our plans and models, and in 1932 a large-scale
Antarctic 'Pole Sud* show was opened in Paris. Further, the World
Exhibitions of Brussels and Paris were equipped with zoo construc-
tions by Heinrich, and here too Stellingen supplied the livestock.

10-AML

FROM TEARS TO LAUGHTER

WHEN IN 1931 the unemployment figures exceeded the six million
mark and one nearly needed a special certificate to be a street sweeper,
business was so bad that we decided to keep only one circus on the
road. The following year, with heavy heart, we implemented that
decision. There was hunger in Germany, and veteran business men
with years of experience behind them kept a worried eye on the
political pendulum, wondering whether it was to swing to right or to
left.

My second son, Herbert, had been through the training of a
Hamburg bank, and was now back from Detroit, where he had en-
larged his knowledge. We had need of a man with the special know-
ledge necessary to steer our many-branched enterprise through the
ever more complicated tangle of currency regulations. But Herbert's
heart was all on the side of the circus, the performing animal groups
of which we sold in this year to Sarrasani for one hundred and twenty
thousand marks. I make no secret of it, both of us, father and son,
wept when Hans Stosch-Sarrasani left our Essen hotel room after we
had signed away our elephants, our many zebus, our camels and our
lovely horses. But there is inexorably all the difference in the world
between parting from lifeless possessions and parting from living
animals each of which one knows by name and has been partly
responsible for bringing up.

However, we still retained sufficient rolling-stock, tenting and
animals to enter the arena again as soon as circumstances should per-
mit. Herbert meanwhile took a job now with the Blackpool Tower
Company, where he showed his ponies and, being a first-class horse-
man, also did haute tcok work. At the same time, Rudolf Matthies and
his tigers, and our other tamers and their groups, were found other
engagements, while we wallowed in the work of our Atlanten Animal
Park and business deals, trying to find a way out of the blind alley.
Surely the world was big enough. There must be millions upon mil-
lions in it who had never seen a circus.

Then it flashed into my brain our solution was to go to the Far
East, hi the night silence I can still hear Heimich bellowing: 'Lorenz,

146

FROM TEARS TO LAUGHTER

man alive, you've gone barmy !' For Heinrich was never a lover of in-
calculable risks. He always refused to hand out more than there
actually was in the kitty, and one had to admit that his cautious hus-
bandry and rigid accounting had indeed piloted the firm through
many a difficulty.

But the Far East 1 The idea never left me day or night. And when,
in June 1932, I found myself at a Rotary Club luncheon in company
with Dr. Voretzsch, our Ambassador to Tokyo, who was visiting
Hamburg, I asked him straight how the proposal struck him.

'It's a grand idea,' he replied at once, 'and don't delay. I am going
back through Siberia in a fortnight's time, it would be pleasant to have
entertaining company on that long journey. '

However, that was a bit too soon for me to make up my mind
completely, but all the same the Ambassador gave me the names of a
number of people of whom I might make inquiries. The telegraph and
airmail services to Japan got busy, and Dr. Knoll of the Tokyo Em-
bassy was kind enough to do all he could to further my plan. Our
interchange of correspondence was an object-lesson in high-speed
long-distance advance-agent circus arrangements. There were very
many things to be elucidated, for Japan was a circus terra incognita to
us. The Tenno himself had heard of our efforts. Suddenly it was the
wish of the Japanese to see Carl Hagenbeck's German circus open its
doors simultaneously with a great Tokyo exhibition to be called
Bankokofujin Kodomo Hakurankai which turned out to mean Mother
and Child Exhibition. They requested us to make haste. That decided
the matter ! It was Japan for us ! Out there, at a site I was yet to know
called Shibaura, fifteen thousand square metres* of Japanese soil had
been reserved for us.

Together with my nephew and Fritz Wegner, who was our agent
at the time, I had to pull up my socks. Not a bad idea, I thought, for
folk setting off to Japan, where they would so often have to take off
their shoes in private houses. We travelled by way of Basle and Rome,
where we still owned zoos, and Naples, where we boarded 'Japanese
soil' in the shape of the s.s. Terukini Maru, a Japanese steamship which
was outstanding for three things impeccable cleanliness, silent
service and obliging, smiling staff. This I needed, for the irritations
and stresses of last-moment financial and shipping cares which just
before we left all but cancelled this Far Eastern tour had given me
jaundice. Now I sprawled on deck in a deck-chair, on diet, listening

* Roughly four hundred yards square. Translator.

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

to no radio and never reading the ship's newspaper, till the good cap-
tain got really worried and began to wonder if the Japanese kitchen
had disagreed with me. However, after twelve days' healing sea
voyage, we reached Colombo, where we were of course entertained
by Uncle John, who after the war had gone back to his business "as
ship's chandler and plantation owner.

Here I first heard the news that Hitler had become Chancellor of
the Reich, and when Uncle John asked me what the man looked like
I found I could not tell him, for since the end of the war there seemed
to have been at least one, sometimes two, new occupants of the
Chancellor's chair every year.

'What now?' asked Uncle John. Fritz and I shrugged our shoulders,
and the talk turned easily to our next question : What had happened at
Stellingen since we left?

A voluminous mail and newspaper cuttings gave us all the details.
We had apparently chartered the ten-thousand-ton Hapag steamship
Saarland, and under Heinrich and Sawade's specific instructions our
Stellingen shippers of the rare name of Schmidt had undertaken to
transform it into the most up-to-date Noah's Ark that ever crossed the
Atlantic. For as Cook's is to the two-legged, so is Schmidt to the four-
legged tourist. He knows all their airline and railway time-tables by
heart, and if our animals could speak it would be to him they would
turn and make their stipulations. Surprisingly enough, these would be
for comfortable quarters, meals on time and calm seas !

As Schmidt told us later, to get that ship for us he chugged the
rounds of the Hamburg docks in a blizzard, looking at every single
bottom there, for the supply was greater than the demand, and he could
take his choice of many. The docks were then a fine reflection of the
economic crisis through which Germany was passing. But our require-
ments were very special. We needed a steamer with very extensive
deck space if we were to get all our circus wagons on board. There
must also be roomy space between decks, and special facilities for load-
ing. There must be ample space for stabling four hundred animals, not
to speak of cabins for one hundred and sixty men and women, on that
sea voyage of at least fifty days. For reasons of economy we were to put
in at no other port but Hong Kong.

s.s. Saarland satisfied most of these considerations. The only main
structural lack was any fourteen-foot high compartment for the
giraffes. Refrigeration was also insufficient and she lacked both a
satisfactory water system (for the animals) and the requisite number of

148

FROM TEARS TO LAUGHTER

bunks (for the staff). So the next step was to dry-dock her, and get the
hydraulic tools busy. Partitions were run up, conveniences were in-
stalled. Profile-cutters let daylight into her sides, to make port-holes
for the animals' quarters. 'Thermos' chests, to be packed with ice,
provided cold storage for the tremendous quantities of meat which had
to be taken. Special fittings were installed to protect valuable trained
horses. We bought quantities of rejected mattresses to line the stable
walls.

Every countryman will know that you cannot well keep horses in the
stable fifty days on end. Consequently there had to be a trotting track
on board. This was achieved by combining three holds aft and flooring
them with specially grooved planking, to give the horses a grip. Simi-
lar facilities for exercise were provided for the more exotic animals.
The chimpanzees' quarters were best of all, for they and their atten-
dants had the sunniest cabins. The cages and tanks for the camels, sea-
lions and hippopotami were all on the upper deck.

For a fortnight the giant Hapag steamer, now restored to life again,
rang with the sound of machine tools, and then tugs pulled our Noah's
Ark round to the Kaiser Wilhelm Dock, where men with paint pots
added the great words 'CARL HAGENBECK, STELLINGEN' to her
sides. Loading began on January ijth, 1933, the men working in
shifts round the clock on a six-day plan which since many a long year
Hervart Schmidt had worked out to the last dot on the *i' for Hagen-
beck's. He throned it now in the smoking saloon, thence handling the
twenty-two tons of horsemeat piled into the refrigeration rooms and
all the trainloads of baled straw, hay, bread, turf and frozen fish. The
whole thing was worked out to the minute, for every one of those
minutes cost a lot of money in harbour dues. Every corner of that ship
was utilised. For instance, there was provision for the workshops
which every circus needs, for the men who handled the animals' food,
even for the dung-carts to have a fairway to work in.

Yes, Hagenbeck was loading up for Japan ! The news had thrilled
everybody in Hamburg who had anything to do with cinema, radio,
camera-work or press. They all flocked down to the quayside. The
cuttings of press reports and pictures gave me a graphic picture of the
departure. Elephants were snapped as they were swung on board well
wrapped in padded canvas coats. For at Hamburg it was bitterly cold
that evening of February 3rd, 1933. There was pack ice floating down
the Elbe when our ark set sail for Yokohama.

Making my way back at last on board the Terukini Mam I found that

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

Stellingen had been cabling us, and I sent them a 'good luck* message
back. It was exciting indeed to be on the way at last to that unknown
Japan, with the knowledge that fast on our heels was coming our own
specially chartered ten-thousand tonner with the whole circus on
board. But the responsibility for this giant risk did at times seem to
weigh heavy on my shoulders. What reassured me more than anything
else, I think, was the knowledge that on board the Saarland was our
best man, my good friend Richard Sawade. My two younger boys,
Herbert and Erich, were going to have the experience of this big
world circus tour under him my eldest, Carlo, had stayed at home,
to look after Stellingen together with his cousin Carl Heinrich.

Telegrams now began to fly between the Terukini Mam and the
Saarland. The blood left my cheeks when Sawade told me that the
great heat was getting the animals down badly. Happily, they soon
recovered, once the Saarland got through the terrible Straits of
Malacca and the fresher trades of the South Chinese Ocean blew in
between decks.

Impatient to set foot in Nippon, the Land of the Rising Sun, and see
it with our own eyes, as soon as we berthed at Kobe Fritz Wegner and
I took our hand valises and went ashore, leaving our trunks to go on to
Yokohama without us. We went first to Kyoto, to get an over-all
glimpse of the land and its people. I was also most anxious to see what
the Kyoto Zoo was like. At once all my Madame butterfly illusions were
washed away, by copious sleet and snow, which no clerk of the
weather in old Hamburg ever laid on a man's umbrella better ! Visiting
the zoo, I found only a half-frozen Japanese gentleman, wrapped as
deeply as he could contrive in his kimono, squatting over a tiny
charcoal fire and trying to warm hands and feet.

To him we made advances in German, English, Spanish and French.
But all he did was continue his huddle, as if apart from a fine
ability to smile his senses were entirely frozen up. Rather despair-
ingly, I handed my card to a young lady who suddenly came in. She
too produced a smile, then turned to the huddled deaf-and-dumb
gentleman. Now I did seem to have achieved something, for the
contracted statue got to its feet, and, without a glance in our direction,
vanished, a little later to bring back a couple of chairs to offer us.

Another quarter of an hour crept by. Then suddenly the ice really
did break. In came a lively young interpreter, who had lived long in
the United States, and he made us very welcome. We now discovered
that the dumb gentleman was not a curator, but merely another zoo

FROM TEARS TO LAUGHTER

visitor 1 I proceeded to make my first Japanese obeisance, for in that
country, I had already learned, it is a mark of essential good deport-
ment to honour any other person with whom one has to do with
frequent bows. Moreover, in this proceeding, a junior person, or
employee certainly therefore also the courteous foreigner should
take good care never to be the first to call off the bowing. One should
also not forget that while one bows A la Japanese, one should contrive
a sharp intake of breath between the teeth ffffl ffff! ffff !

So we bowed and we hissed away, till, with the aid of the inter-
preter, Mr. Suzuki, the zoo's curator, drew us into conversation and
we were in due course shown over his zoo, where of course we came
on all those things which together form so powerful a bond between
animal-men all over the world. Gaily we chattered shop and exchanged
experiences. Then Mr. Suzuki asked us to take a meal with him. And
that is where the shoe- taking-off began.

The scene was an unheated pavilion. There were plenty of straw
mats about, but it was freezing cold. Hence we did not feel any the
better for having our shoes off. Fortunately, we were almost at once
served with tiny porcelain bowls of a very savoury and also very warm-
ing soup. Then came the main dish and with it the famous Japanese
chopsticks, handling which is a special art, demanding long practice,
unless you choose to rise from table hungry. The word * table', of
course, is an exaggeration. We were squatting in Japanese style on the
floor on cushions. Thus squatting, and also bowing very properly
indeed, we strove to convey some of the food from bowl to lips, a
juggling turn which was only fragmentarily successful.

Before me, I remember, lay a most appetising little parcel. It was
a tang,* wrapped in a leaf and soused in a red sauce. Plunging head-
long into these Japanese prandial antics, I prodded away and juggled
my chopsticks till my palate suddenly informed me that the lovely-
looking concotion, apart from the rice, was quite raw. Wegner and I
chewed as bravely as we could, with, as one says in Hamburg, a long-
tooth mouth, meanwhile keeping running a good commentary in our
best Hamburg Low German dialect, which was always our custom
abroad when we were not sure whether anyone nearby knew real
German. Not that we wanted to disclose state secrets. It is merely
something of a relief sometimes to be able to unburden oneself for a
moment to a kindred soul. But by now Mr. Suzuki had guessed part of
our trouble, and somehow he charmed European cutlery to our table,
* A fish of tropical waters. Translator.

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

Otherwise, we should have emerged from his house to continue our
journey to Tokyo empty inside, if very well greased without!

How beautifully Tokyo received us! Beside Kurahashi San,* the
manager of the Tokyo Exhibition, stood his small daughter like a
brightly coloured little doll, and as a sign of welcome she handed me
a bouquet. At the same time all round flashed the bulbs of the camera
pressmen. I was at the same time conscious of an enormous number of
grinning faces looking at me while I bowed away like an animated
pump handle.

Next came the effort to distinguish one face from another. Just as
apparently they find all Europeans as alike as peas, our eyes needed
time to get used to the Asiatic physiognomy-landscape. I was, how-
ever, at last rescued by our letter and telegram confederate, Dr. Knoll,
and we were ceremoniously taken to the guaranteed anti-earthquake
Imperial Hotel Teikoku, the following morning to be received by
almost exactly the same numerous company, and make our first trip
out to the proposed circus ground out at Shibaura.

Well, and so there we were at last, at the fifteen thousand square
metres reserved for us. But I wondered. The ground looked curiously
soft. Indeed, it looked as if it had but recently been stirred up by a
giant plough. Filled with misgivings I stepped forward on to the loose
soil, and, to the evident delight of the Japanese gentlemen accompany-
ing me (who seemed to accept the act as a sort of circus joke), I
thrust my walking-stick down into it it slipped in easily right to the
handle!

Heavens alive, here our heavy rolling-stock would be hopelessly
bogged. I saw my nephew make his notes : hard core, lorries, steam-
rollers ! But as the day wore on we found we had a great deal to jot
down like that. And when, that evening, after a day of conferences and
meetings during which much tea was drunk and many words were
spoken we sank exhausted on to our beds to discuss the events of the
day, we were still filling up the pages of those Required notebooks.

Whenever in Germany our circus went anywhere it was of course
understood that our business agents and publicity men had some sixty
more or less arduous jobs to look after, but it was of course customary
to deal with those during the preceding winter season. Besides, at
Hamburg we only had to say the word and the printing firm which
handled our printing knew at once all about runs of differently col-
oured tickets, dates and times of performance, and so on and so forth.

* San corresponds to our Mr. or Heir, and is placed after the Japanese name.

FROM TEARS TO LAUGHTER

But here the slightest matter had to be dealt with ponderously through
interpreters.

True, the Japanese invariably rewarded our requests with courteous
smiles and much bowing, but on the other hand we were never once
quite sure that they had really understood or would execute the order
on time. With the best will in the world it was impossible for them to
grasp what a big European circus meant, and consequently they could
have no inkling of its technical requirements.

We had to find local staff quickly. Wages, in our eyes, were
fantastically low. But whereas at home the pay desk was always occu-
pied by one girl at a time, who both tore off the tickets and handed
out change, here it appeared that one had to have two geishas, one to
take the money, the other to hand out the tickets. Why could one
girl not do both jobs? Did we ask: Why? Yes, we asked: Why? There
would at once be smiles patient and enchanting. But no, Circus San,
that was impossible! Circus San is what all ordinary folk called us.
Only a few rose to Hagenbecku San.

Our preparations now had to be constantly interrupted by numerous
lectures and talks. I was asked to speak to the German- Japanese
Society, the German Club, to give talks at the zoo, interviews to the
press. I must say that we were most grateful to the latter. Day in, day
out, they whetted the appetites of their readers with articles, inter-
views and reports as to the position of the Saarland, that 'wonder
ship* approaching their shores from out of the West.

To make the tense excitement which developed more concrete, let
me point out that in Japanese there is no word for giraffe. For this
concept they use a sign which is known as kirin. Basically, kirin means
dragon or fabulous animal. Well, and so was the Saarland not a
'wonder ship/ since it had two kirins on board, the first ever to be
brought to Japanese shores? 'Live kirins,' one supposed, to Japanese
folk meant much what it would have meant had we told Hamburg
that out at Stellingen we could offer them a glimpse of two Loch Ness
monsters !

THE OCEAN BRINGS A FAIRY SHIP

AT LAST the day had come ! There was the profound bass voice of the
s.s. Saarland bellowing in Yokohama Roads, after her long voyage of
thirteen thousand six hundred miles. Yes, Hagenbeck's Noah's Ark
was really there, and its cries brought out a whole flotilla of cutters
from the quayside. Customs men, port medical officers, quarantine
inspectors, animal dealers and an army of journalists accompanied the
motor-boat which took me out to her.

How gay and bright on deck were our circus wagons ! Like magni-
fied toy models, I found myself speaking. Our men had worked won-
ders in the forty-eight days of their voyage. Everything was gleaming
with new paint. Bravo ! And there at the rail was Captain Engell to
greet me. I expressed my heartfelt thanks for his thus bringing his
unusual cargo safe to its destination, and with forty-eight hours in
hand too. And there were my own lads, sun-tanned, eager to get
going. There too was Richard Sawade, my faithful substitute. Hand-
shakes and greetings in nearly every tongue of Europe followed, for
apart from Liechtenstein, Monaco and Portugal, every single country
was represented among our performers, animal tamers and technical
staff. Indeed, one old rascal was actually greeting me in Japanese. Hold
hard, but who on earth could that be?

Yes, I could believe my eyes, it was 'Yours ever, in the pink,
Martell.' And though he certainly was not the inventor of brandy, he
was already celebrated in his own way, having served as model for one
of the giant figures of the Kaiser Wilhelm memorial on the Hamburg
Courts of Justice in Sieveking Square. Sawade, I recalled, had rejected
Martell's written application for a job, and then, at the last moment,
took him on as reserve hand, and by the time the circus reached Japan
Martell had undertaken to have produced a circus man's vade-mecum
in the language of Nippon. Without hesitation I now sent him along
to our publicity manager, and he was put in charge of our billposting,
for though all the sections of our mammoth picture posters got sorted
out all right, the same could not be said of the runners with letterpress,
so Martell began work in Japan reshuffling all the advertisements for a

THE OCEAN BRINGS A FAIRY SHIP

firm called Genbeckha with which Japan was already busy plastering
itself.

Later the head of the Tokyo 'Institute of Billposting* called on me
and wished to apologise, but I reassured him. I told him that the
'Welcome* which we thought we had up in good Japanese for years
outside our famous red-lacquered Japanese Island Garden at Stellingen
had been upside down, until one day a Japanese consul summoned up
courage to point out the error. This information seemed to afford
great relief. It was a very welcome saving of face.

And what sort of trip had our folk had? 'Magnificent,' came the
cries from all sides. Every evening the band played dance music. They
had a swimming pool on board to cool off in, while under an awning
aft our good interpreter Martell conducted regular classes in Japanese.
He had spent much of the first world war at Kiaochow as a Japanese
prisoner of war and he had learned the language well. Even my cook
(whom I had been missing terribly) had done her best for though such
dishes as Hamburg eel soup were her triumphs, she had prepared for
life in Japan by getting Martell to inscribe in a handy notebook the
Japanese hieroglyphs for all possible culinary needs.

Losses on the voyage had been minimal. One of Casi's group of
horses had died, but on the other hand while crossing the Indian
Ocean the mare Oceana had foaled a fine son. The animals were in
excellent condition when the photographers poured into every corner
of the ship with their flashlight bulbs. In the cage -wagons they found
forty lions, tigers and bears of all sorts roaring, pacing about, gam-
bolling. In their tanks were sea-lions, bellowing hoarsely and busily
cavorting. Every part of the world was represented by its animals. It
was a sight to see those astonished Japanese below decks, staring at
the giraffes, for the animals* heads, at the end of their endless necks,
were somewhere up above the ceiling, busy at the mangers on the floor
above.

The finest incident, however, occurred .concerning our African
rhinoceros. This was at once cordoned off by customs officers. Since
antiquity, so it seems, the peoples of Asia have attributed a wide
range of high qualities to this animal's nose-piece. For instance, well
pulverised rhinoceros horn is reputed a source of great vigour. No
wonder that it is considered worth its weight in gold, especially since
Indian hunters long since reduced the rhinoceros there to a furtive
remnant, highly protected by special game laws. The result was that
Japanese customs regulations still envisaged a remarkably high customs

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

duty for rhino horns, so before it was released we had to enter into
a special written undertaking on no account to saw anything off our
specimen* s boko.

There was also a tremendous fuss about lethal weapons. Not only
my sporting guns but also the blank cartridge pistols of our tamers and
the practical-joke weapons of the clowns were all confiscated by the
police. Only after long negotiations was I able to ensure that our
tamers might use their pistols during shows. Before the item came on,
a policeman was there to hand the pistols out, and with much polite
smiling to take them in again when the performance was over !

A novel feature of the behaviour of the Japanese press was the way
in which its reporters brought with them tiny bamboo cages contain-
ing cooing carrier pigeons. These were later released from the Saar-
land's deck, complete with little aluminium tubes of film or reports
tied to their legs, and 'homed* to the roofs of the newspaper offices,
so that a few hours later the Tokyo Nishi Nishi, Asahi Shimbun and
what have you could disseminate the latest sensation throughout that
city of millions of sandal-footed crowds: the fabulous ship had
arrived! Animals known only to fairy stories had for the first time
reached Japan !

Now we found that the two days which Captain Engell had managed
to save on the way out most useful, for the unloading in Yokohama
Roads was a much more difficult business than we with our European
and South American port experience had foreseen. It started well
enough. Out swung the derricks, there was the officer in charge at his
post, with his megaphone, and there were Richard Sawade and my boys
to assist him. Chutes came into position, holds were opened, donkey
engines drew out the heavily loaded wagons. Harbour tugs were ready
to keep up a steady shuttle traffic, pulling heavily laden barges from the
Saarland to Ahibaura, and a canal led direct to this Tokyo suburb.

Ah, but there was the snag ! That canal passed under bridges, and the
bridges had not been built with sufficient clearance for any high-
loaded vessel to pass. Because of this I had to appjy for a large floating
crane. But this was not forthcoming at once, and I had to fall back on a
contraption which, however worthy of respect as a museum piece, was
hardly the tool for the job. It was worked by hand, eight men turning
the windlass ! Only after an hour and a half of real grind did it succeed
in getting one heavy lorry of scaffold poles ashore. Even so, a rope
broke in the process and as the truck crashed to the ground our fore-
man escaped by the skin of his teeth. Had he not had the presence of

THE OCEAN BRINGS A FAIRY SHIP

mind to fling Wmself flat on the ground between the wheels he would
have been a dead man.

Of course, he was furious, and had something rather pithy to say to
the man in charge of that winding team. But that worthy only bowed
and smiled.

'Circus San,' he said in his broken English, 'we always unload like
this, and we shall go on doing it like this. I should be very interested
to see you do any better.'

I intervened and tried to get the man to see what we wanted to have
done, but he only kept up his grinning and bowed. He had understood
absolutely nothing. Happily, at that point up came a German lecturer
at Tokyo University. Our own interpreter at that moment had his
hands or rather his tongue full on board the Saarland, so our
academic friend now filled the breach and explained what we were
after. We must have two of our track-laying tractors got ashore from
the Saarland without delay. When this had been accomplished,
though with no little difficulty, they were well anchored to the quay
and used as tractive power units. After that we unloaded our stuff at
the rate of one item every five minutes, though this, as may be imag-
ined, was not nearly fast enough for our transport foreman, and as his
every other word now became 'Hajaku!' 'Get a move on!' he was
very soon known as Hayaku San 'Mr. Get-a-move-on ! ' and the
name stuck to him throughout our Japanese tour.

Hayaku, hayaku I Tokyo was flabbergasted at the speed with which
we got our tents erected, for now we were moving fast in the mean-
time our floating crane had arrived. Every time it took up a load
circus wagon, lighting plant or hippopotamus tank it heeled over as
if it too wanted to show our stuff Japanese courtesy. On the fifth day
our pennants were already flying over our tents, and there was an
uninterrupted shuttling of unloading crates from the Saarland to a
fleet of barges, and elephants, zebus, llamas, camels, zebras came
ashore. When it came to the giraffes, in their towering cages, as big as
weekenders' cottages, out flocked the press boys again to see such
mythical animals dangling from a modern crane. The interest was so
real that we hit on the idea of sending the giraffes through the city, for
publicity reasons, and behind the cages of the fabulous kirins a huge
crowd fell in.

Luck indeed was on our side. On the route we selected had been
erected a huge wooden triumphal arch, a sort of gateway to the
Mother and Child Exhibition, which was in full swing, but, alas, the

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

arch proved too low pitched for our giraffes. Were the courteous
Japanese dismayed? Not in the least. They at once sent for a team of
men to take down the offending triumphal structure. I grasped what
they intended to do just in time, put my foot down, said firmly : 'No 1*
Instead, we managed the obstacle in much simpler fashion. Our men
quickly unloaded our two lanky ladies, and on foot, on the ground,
the fair giraffes found it quite easy to get under the archway, while
without them on board sticking up their necks there was no difficulty
about our caterpillar tractor pulling their carriage underneath.
'Banzai!' 'Bravo!' cried the Japanese, who did not seem even to
have thought of it. The crowd was most enthusiastic about that effort
and the Tokyo evening papers had a lot to say about what good heads
we had on our shoulders !

Next we dealt with the difficulty of our terrain. In spite of all the
slag we had put down we had cleaned out all Tokyo's gasworks
our site still proved too soft for our heavy wheeled stuff. Our wagon
wheels cracked the square wooden water-conduits and our car-
penters had a lot to do, mending and improvising at hayaku tempo.

However, by now our traffic chief had mastered all his linguistic
snags. To the word for 'Get a move on!' he had added four others:
'Yellow/ 'Red, 1 'Come here' and 'Go there!' To his Japanese
workers he had issued yellow and red arm-bands, and now, with the
aid of most expressive arm and leg movements of his own, backed by
many a pithy turn of phrase in good Palatinate brogue (which of course
hurt nobody), he could put any men just where he wanted them. If he
wanted a tool, he drew in the sand with his stick, and there was the
tool. Indeed, in the end I got the impression that Hayaku San would
have got his circus up just as well with a team of Eskimos.

The Japanese, I should add here, are a very quick-witted people,
most anxious to learn. One morning I had a call from the Japanese
Chief Scout. He wanted me to take on some of his boys, of course
paying them. They wanted to earn money to build a new centre, and
in Japanese terms our wages were most attractive. As it was going to
be most troublesome to take on and teach new hands in every town
we came to, I said I was prepared to offer the scouts a job for the
whole tour, and picked a team of the stronger senior lads, and they
went through the whole of Japan with us. Our chief properties man
took them under his wing and taught them how in a matter of seconds
to carry a large carpet into the ring at the double and unroll it all four
corners at once. They did their best, but during their initial training

THE OCEAN BRINGS A FAIRY SHIP

still seemed unable to comprehend our constant demand for celerity.
I think that in their hearts of hearts they thought we were all a bit
cracked.

'Herr Circus,' said their troop leader to me one day, with all
observance of politeness, 'why does everything with you have to be
done in such a hurry? We have so much time before us, and there are
also things which can be donej'uJbri (at your ease)/ Only when per-
formances began did they understand at last what'it was all about, and
then they turned into very loyal and also very nimble assistants.

Before the official opening, there had to be a special performance
for Her Imperial Highness the Grand Princess Kuni. When the day
arrived, I felt obliged to ask the exhibition authorities to put the event
off for a day. A storm was raging and we could not give a show with a
clear conscience on the safety side. But what a problem postponement
presented! We could not send the Empress Mother and her retinue
home ! Heavens alive, no man dare suggest such a thing, least of all the
exhibition management, who had rather prematurely made the
arrangement. They had built a special pavilion for the august visitor,
and punctually at four o'clock there she was. They assured me that by
six the storm would abate, and indeed it did, and then the great lady,
who for two whole hours had impassively observed the circus tent
from her pavilion, tripped out on her high-heeled sandals, followed
by her retinue, and with many a profound obeisance I followed her to
her box.

For myself, this performance, which was more like a general re-
hearsal, was in many ways most unsatisfactory, but the Japanese saw
with other eyes, and were all praise. Indeed, had they not been satis-
fied, the Empress Mother would not have come four more times, till
all the princes, princesses and other relations, each with their suite of
ministers and high dignitaries, had seen the show.

The very next day, Tokyo came pouring in, the entrance in Japanese
fashion framed in tall bamboo scaffolding with crowns of honour.
Every item awakened the greatest amazement. As they had translated
some of their jokes into Japanese, our clowns got a wonderful recep-
tion. All that grind on the school benches of the Saarland now bore
fruit.

As the sea-lions, camels, zebra and our magnificent horses had gone
through their items in the open ring, the Japanese now came to the
conclusion that the lions and tigers were going to do the same. Indeed,
were those dangerous animals not depicted on our placards without

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

bars? So far, all that the newspapers had promised had come about. So
perhaps this would also materialise. And as they were quite incapable
of understanding that within three minutes the central cage of iron
bars would spring up and shut the ring off from them, the good
Japanese took the precaution of flocking from their seats. However,
the more courageous at least stayed at the exits, to peep back, and
when they reported to their compatriots outside what preventive
measures were being introduced, they all poured back again into the
tent, and now for the first time saw the kings of the polar ice, the
jungle and the steppes joined together in wonderful performing
groups, for them to marvel at in safety from only a few feet distance.

After our first performance there was great competition in Tokyo
to entertain us circus folk. My own wagon filled up with flowers and
presents, among these a costly samurai sword from the president of the
exhibition committee. I could see that my room was far too small for
all the many friends and visitors I should have, so I decided on a gala
performance with a reception inside our big top.

Yards and yards of cold buffet were installed on trestles, barrels and
barrels of beer were rolled in, and the ring was transformed into a
dance floor, while I took my guests on a tour of the animal show. In
this way I contrived to return the great hospitality with which I had
been honoured by the Germania Club of Yokohama, the German
Association, and many German and Japanese friends. Our consul made
a speech of gratitude in the name of the guests, while on the Japanese
side the exhibition president, Kurahashi, spoke, ending, to great
applause, with the words: 'Herr Hagenbeck, with your circus you
have done more towards understanding between the peoples than all
the diplomatists at Geneva.'

Finally, I must record that one day I received an invitation in
Japanese on expensive notepaper with the embossed imperial chry-
santhemum. Our interpreter translated it: I was summoned to an
audience by my gracious elevated patron, the Grand Princess Kuni. I
had made her a twittering present of a pair of lovely Harz Mountain
siskins, and this had captivated her heart. She had sent these little
canaries to her palace to be court songsters. She kept me in con-
versation a long time and I found her interested in a very wide range
of subjects. When she received me she wore European costume,
though she did not make such a striking figure in this as she did in her
colourful Japanese kimono, in which she seemed to exemplify all the
virtues and wisdom of her people.

1 60

Top: Rudolf Jurkschat, his Arab steed and team of twelve, a great
feature of our touring circus

Bottom: Richard Sawade with his lions and tigers at 'Hagenbeck's
Animal Park, Stellingen

A bird's-eye view of our canvas town whether at home or in far-off
Tokyo, perfect order was the rule

Meni, our working elephant, handled many a load of circus material

THE OCEAN BRINGS A FAIRY SHIP

One morning there was a great procession of Tokyo and Yokohama
school children out to the circus. They marched singing and waving
little flags. They were all dressed in blue blouses, girls and boys alike,
the boys wearing trousers and the girls skirts. Their round little faces,
aglow with anticipation, were like so many friendly little full moons
shining out of their white Schiller-style collars. They were the most
docile and disciplined children I have ever had as my circus guests. It
gave me great delight to see their decent well-brought-up behaviour
as they drew near and marvelled at our alien world of wonders.

161

MARVELLING AT KIRIN

NOTWITHSTANDING THE fine attendances, we could not stay at Tokyo
for ever. In the early days of our successful run there, I had gone on to
Nagoya, while with friendly nodding head my wax double drove on
through the streets of Tokyo. The Mother and Child Exhibition had
fitted out a tram-car and two trailers as a sort of mobile advertising
circus, and in this Noah's Ark on wheels stood a gentleman in festive
morning coat and top hat Lorenz Hagenbeck San, more than life size,
represented as the lord of a collection of stuffed animals and clowns.
It was a delightful piece of advertisement for our circus.

However, I had other cares besides balancing a drain-pipe on my
head. 'The most you can put your show on at Nagoya for is four days,'
I was told. 'No European theatre ever had a longer run than that.
Besides, don't forget, Mr, Circus, it is the rainy season!'

But Nagoya was Japan's largest industrial town, the country's source
of consumer goods, working day and night. My mind went back to
Essen in the Ruhr and our reception there, so, in spite of all those
gloomy warnings, I risked the venture, particularly after the Nagoya
Mayor, Mr. Oiwa, called on me in Tokyo and begged me to bring the
circus to his city. He said I could count on his help.

Now, as my Tokyo run ended, among the many invitations which I
received there was one in Japanese which I confess I overlooked. One
stifling afternoon, I had just got back to my hotel, exhausted, with the
firm intention of taking a luxurious bath, when the telephone rang,
and there was Richard Sawade, in a state of great excitement, asking
me if I had forgotten my luncheon? Yes, my gala luncheon at the
Ueno Park Hotel!

'And what may all that be in honour of?' I asked him rather tartly.

'Goodness gracious, man, but have you forgotten that the Grand
Princess Kuni has asked you to a private farewell luncheon with her.
You are late ! She has been waiting for the last hour ! '

I don't think I ever put on a morning coat with greater alacrity.
Indeed, I did so with such haste that I completely forgot to change my
shoes, and it was only when the taxi was rushing me thither that to my
horror I saw that I was wearing brown shoes. But however awkward

162

MARVELLING AT KIRIN

that was, it was not nearly so awkward as it would have been to keep
my august hostess waiting any longer. As I thus reflected, my taxi
drew up at the Ueno Park Hotel; there were two smiling court
marshals doubled up before me at the entrance, and I sped up the
steps, only ninety minutes late. With profound bows and much zaA-
za/i,* I most humbly begged pardon in my broken Japanese. But her
Imperial Highness only smiled. I was apparently forgiven. Later, I
received a silver cup to remember this farewell audience by.

For eight weeks the folk of Tokyo had been pouring in to our circus.
Now came the dismantling, and this was made to look like a mobilisa-
tion. The Japanese Minister of War sent a party of high-up Army
officers to study our methods of packing men, animals and equipment.
Forty-two stationmasters from the Tokyo-Nagoya line were present
for the same reason. When, strictly according to schedule, both our
special trains were loaded up, it suddenly transpired that the tunnels
were too low for our dwelling wagons, loaded on platform trucks 1

This information brought our good foreman Hayaku some more
grey hairs. While, legs tucked under them, the Army engineers and
the railway brass hats were still sipping tea, and discussing all the
possibilities and feasibilities with Asiatic calm, our good foreman had
already reached his decision, and the work of taking the wheels off all
our road wagons had begun. For the next twenty-four hours our staff,
assisted by railwaymen, were busy with jacks and hoists, till our whole
crocodile of orange-blue lay on its belly, its wheels packed separately,
and the locos could whistle for departure.

The publishers of the Nagoya newspaper, Shimbun, wanted at all
costs to serve their Mayor and city well. They had called on me in
Tokyo to propose taking the whole of our publicity on themselves on
a basis of fifty per cent, of the menagerie's gate, and this I had accepted.
Now the Shimbun got going, million editions of issue after issue flying
trom its rotary presses. There were whole-page spreads of pictures,
reports, interviews, cartoons, advertisements, all concerned with
Hagenbeck. Shimbun reporters poked into every corner of our dwelling
wagons. Their aircraft photographers banked dangerously round our
circus masts, they crept into the elephant wagons, they worked side
by side with our stable boys. And, of course, as pressman's standby
there was also the wondrous Jb'rin, never before seen in Nagoya.

* i.e. the polite audible intake of breath. Translator.

163

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

The very first day, the circus tent was completely surrounded by an
enormous throng of people. At the menagerie box-office there was a
four-deep queue. It stretched all round us, growing every minute.
Having sold out its advance-booking tickets for both circus and
menagerie, the Nagoya Shimbun with thoughtless enthusiasm had
immediately printed and sold more! Without delay I rang up the
editorial office to convince them that the circus was not made of
elastic; however many tickets they printed, the seating would not
expand. Fortunately, the numbered tickets had only been sold once, so
it was easy to exchange the others for later tickets.

By now, every tea-house in Japan was singing a popular song about
us. One heard it ground out on records everywhere, all tea-house
singers sang and played it. Switch on the radio, and ten to one we
would yet again hear that Hagenbeck song which sounded so strange
to our ears. It said that a fairy ship had come to them over the dancing
waves of the ocean 1

Ambulatory postcard-sellers now did huge business with circus
picture postcards. In any toy-shop in Tokyo you could buy a model of
the Saarland and all its animals, in pasteboard, wood or celluloid.
There were Hagenbeck kimonos on sale and Hagenbeck scarves, and
you could get paper sunshades with scenes from our circus. One even
cleaned one's teeth with Hagenbeck tooth-paste, and as a free tooth-
brush was customarily included in any hotel room in Japan one could
truly say that we were on all lips.

One day, I was looking out of my office wagon when I could not
believe my eyes. I saw our circus suddenly diminished to Lilliputian
size. Then I learned that it was a Japanese gentleman with an eye to
business who had thought that people would find the tea he served
tasted better in a tent like ours than in an ordinary tea-house.

We had a five weeks' run at Nagoya, with two performances daily,
at two and at five, both always sold out to the last seat. In addition, on
many days we counted no less than twenty-five thousand visitors to the
menagerie. The giraffes were invariably surrounded by classes of school
children busily drawing, by photographers and by astonished sight-
seers.

In view of this great success and the most kindly assistance which we
had been afforded by the Mayor, Mr. Oiwa, I thought I might well
give a free performance for orphans, just as I had done in other coun-
tries. The Mayor wrote me a most polite letter of thanks and said he
would put my friendly offer before the town council. He ended his

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MARVELLING AT KIRIN

letter as follows: 'All this with unpardonable great quantity of lack of
formality our epistolary thanks.'

The following morning our interpreter informed me that there was
a deputation of city councillors to wait on me. I observed at once that
they were robed in their ceremonial kimonos, and when after the
customary long-drawn-out introductions we were at last bent over
steaming little bowls of tea our interpreter rendered the purpose of
their call. Wrapping his message in flowery compliments, the spokes-
man gave me to understand that the position in Japan was that
orphaned children were always taken into the families of their next of
kin. This meant that to invite them to a special performance would
underline the fact that their parents were dead and thereby cause them
pain. I was therefore begged to withdraw my offer.

This request of course I fully understood and it was with great
pleasure that they now accepted my new proposal that the proceeds
of an average day's performance should be given to the city for
charitable purposes.

It was soon after this that we received an invitation to a geisha-
house. I went, accompanied by my sons and nephew and Richard
Sawade. The German Ambassador was also present, and he and I had
the places of honour, large silk screens at our backs, and also beautiful
paintings of Japanese flora and fauna. There were also costly vases of
flowers beautifully selected and arranged, to decorate the large room
in which we all assembled, squatting shoeless on cushions on the floor.
Beside each one of us knelt a geisha, keeping our rice-wine bowls full.
Sake, as it is called, is the Japanese national drink. It tastes like warm
sherry. During the banquet, which; oh wisdom of Nippon, was not
interrupted by speeches, we were served with a variety of Japanese
dishes, including bamboo shoots, lotus buds, rice and fish, all served
in small lacquered bowls or priceless porcelain dishes. At the con-
clusion the Mayor came round to each of us in turn, sitting down be-
side us, to drink a bowl of sak6 with us. When some Japanese ladies
visited us, they found two hours sitting on chairs a strain, and asked
if they might withdraw for a little while to our dwelling wagons to
rest, sitting on the floor. Now the tables were turned. Long squatting
on cushions, with so much doubling up to get at my food, left me
longing for a good simple chair as a change.

In our honour, a geisha ballet group had worked out some special
dances based on scenes from the circus. We were given to understand
that they mimed our aerial acrobats, our carnivores and our balancing

16$

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

seals. To my inexpert eyes the dances were just so much capering
about. I was as blind to their choreographic beauty as I was deaf to the
charms of Far Eastern music. As thin as rakes, these black-haired
damsels strained every fibre of their bodies in their writhings before
the city fathers, but their faces were complete deadpans. To this day
I have not been able even to guess what part of our circus they hon-
oured by a dance in which they held up their big toes pointing to the
sky.

The highlight of this municipal banquet was the ceremonial handing
over of a precious curtain embroidered with gold dragons. From
Nagoya on we used it to drape our bandstand, and it was thereafter
the ornament of our circus, till the day when incendiary bombs sent
the whole thing up in flames. Handing it to me, the Mayor of Nagoya
said: 'May this curtain remind many millions of circus audiences in
Germany and the whole world that Nagoya is the third big city of
Japan/

The speech was lengthy, and though in many points it was just like
those which I have heard on similar occasions in other parts of the
world, it is perhaps not without interest to recall the useful guidance
which the head man of Japan's great industrial city saw in our per-
formances. For Oiwa San had watched all our work, from the dis-
mantling of the circus at Tokyo to its erection at Nagoya, and what he
found specially praiseworthy was the celerity, the cheerfulness and the
precision of the joint effort of men, animals and technical equipment
which we had organised. He declared that in our circus he had for
the first time in his life seen such a marvel of concentrated effort.

No doubt in the original it all sounded more poetic than it did in
translation to speak of the circus as 'a blossom born of sweat and love,'
but it is certainly true that work and unconditional concentration are
the prerequisites of any big enterprise of that sort. After all, even the
piece about the blossom was true, for with shade temperatures of
over 100 F. and the sun blazing down on our big top we did produce
literally rivers of perspiration. Despite the double reed- thatch with
which Foreman Hayaku had equipped them, our dwelling wagons
were like ovens. I felt like the chief of an Equatorial African village.
Richard Sawade had the wall of the circus tent taken down, so that
audiences should have a little more air, sitting under the enormous
sunshade of the big top itself.

It goes without saying that apart from circus business proper, I saw
quite a lot of Japan, but impressions of that country have, since Marco

1 66

MARVELLING AT KIRIN

Polo, been described by many men more professional at it than I am.
Besides, today what interests me most anywhere is animal life. The
golden carp, the wonderful stylised animal sculpture on the roof of
the Nagoya Castle, the temple with the holy tortoises or the cormor-
ant fishermen of Gifu all these are today more lively memories than
all the pagodas, temples and shrines.

When I visited Gifu, I took both my boys with me. Two Japanese
fishermen rowed the boat, over the bows of which projected a long
pole with a basket of fire dangling over the water, the glow of which
attracted the fish. At a tap, the trained cormorants plunged head first
into the water and the catch began, according to the old rhyme, 'Big
'uns in the pot, little 'uns in the crop.'* However, to make sure that
their feathered fishermen kept to the rule their masters had fitted
their necks with a restricting iron ring, so that even if they did try to
swallow a big fish it would not go down, while they were prevented
from flying away by about thirty feet of thin line attached to their
bodies.

* 'Die grossen ins Togfchen, die kleinen ins KrfyfchenS

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DESTROYED BY TYPHOON

UNFORTUNATELY, THIS was to be no simple pleasure voyage for me. I
very soon had another engagement to arrange. The venue this time
was a leading hotel, at Koshien, where I invited our Ambassador and
his secretary, Dr. Knoll, to meet the directors of the Hanshien Railway
Company and to discuss the feasibility of taking the circus there. But
to my dismay Koshien turned out to be a long stretch of beach with an
enormous baseball ground, a bathing establishment, and this one hotel.

'Where on earth am I going to fill my seats from out here?' I
demanded, shaking my head in amazement, for not one single dwelling
house was to be seen. Grinning, the members of the other party to the
conference unfolded a map.

'This is where we are,' explained Mr. Nara, who was also the
representative of a Hamburg exporter and spoke excellent English.

I saw no reason to dispute this assertion, for he pointed to a point
on the map where no houses were indicated.

'You see, Mr. Hagenbeck,' he smiled like any other Japanese
gentleman 'Koshien lies exactly midway between Kobe and Osaka/

This too I did not dispute.

'We can assure you an audience of twenty thousand for every
house P

To cut a long story short, the railway company contrived to bring
out as many as thirty thousand people every day> to fill our circus and
give the menagerie a full gate, and they managed all the publicity too.

The site was two miles away from the railway station at Nishinomia.
With this it was connected by a new asphalted highway. But as far
south as this point, the midday sun blazed down at upwards of 1 30 F. f
so that our orange-blue transport wagons found themselves obliged
to churn through a sort of black gruel, which quickly gummed up
caterpillar trucks, wheels and the soles of men and animals. It was
interesting to observe that, instead of striking across country with the
animals, our Japanese Boy Scouts plodded bravely on in the train of
the rolling-stock, till everybody and everything was literally bogged
down.

It was now a question of cleaning up. The feet of the hooved animals

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DESTROYED BY TYPHOON

did not present any serious problem, but it was not at all so easy in the
case of the elephants, while we found it completely impossible to
scrape the feet of the camels and llamas clean, for they had a hard com-
pacted mass of stones and tar filling their cloven hoofs. However, I
was not going to waste time considering what to do. If there was no
other suitable grease available, it had to be butter, and not a few
pounds of that precious substance went on the animals' gummed-up
feet, which were then well wrapped in bandages. Gradually the butter
melted out the tar, and after a second good dosing we were through
that difficulty, if not like greased lightning, at least like greased hooves.

Meanwhile our publicity scouts had been sent to Kyushu, one of
the four main islands of Japan. They left behind them an excellent
and clearly distinguishable trail of posters, and the fresher the paste
under these the nearer 1 knew we were to our vanguard. Whereas in
Germany these poster boys always had to fight the opposition of people
to having posters on their house walls, and we bought our way through
opposition with free tickets to our shows, here in Japan bill-stickers
had quite another sort of difficulty. For the people here were most
enthusiastic about bright exotic pictures of tigers leaping through
burning hoops, seals standing on their noses, incredible giraffes and
rhinoceroses and proudly caparisoned riding horses.

Our biggest placard of all attracted particular attention. It showed a
clown of giant dimensions with a horn of plenty at his feet, out of
which as out of a box of toys he was building up the circus. It was in
fact a free-fantasy illustration of that Japanese popular song about the
fairy-tale ship bouncing over the sunlit waves out of the Western
world. Whenever this bill was stuck on a house wall our placard boys
had to contend not with the occupant or owner of the building but
with his neighbour, who would besiege them with presents of tea and
fruits and with ceremonious politeness beg them to put up a lovely
picture like that on his house too. This was an obstacle the publicity
boys had never before had to cope with. I found them living in a horn-
of-plenty world of their own, they and their men enjoying many
presents, while they bestowed their own bounties like Oriental
potentates.

On my wagon trundled, between fields of rice, where the peas-
ants laboured, bent low over their work, their faces hidden under
cart-wheel straw hats. Small roadside conveniences were most in-
viting to the wanderer to pause in. There was no heart carved out of
the door of these, as there is at home, but the peasants were most

169

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

thankful for all our contributions to their compost heaps. We also saw
monks with hats like bee-skeps, which covered the whole head, and
blind beggars with their six-foot white poles, surmounted by bells,
tramping the highway. At the sound of their bells, all traffic at once
stopped, everywhere in Japan, for them to be able to cross the road in
safety.

The attitude towards traffic incidents was not quite the same in
Japan as in Europe. One day, in Tokyo, my car was lightly bumped
by another. At once, its driver leapt out and was bowing, while
murmuring words which of course meant nothing to me. But my
chauffeur asked me to return the compliment, to show, he said, that I
had forgiven the offender. So I too bowed, and after much bowing and
excusing the matter was settled. But when we had gone on I could not
refrain from inquiring what the gentleman would have said if we had
rammed him so hard that his car was really damaged?

'Sir,' replied my chauffeur, 'he would have been no less polite to
you, and would have assured you how inconsolable he was and how
sorry he was that such an incident should be the inception of an
acquaintance which afforded him such pleasure. Then, of course, with
your kind permission, he would have made a note of your registration
number and expressed a hope that the magistrate would be able to
elucidate who should foot the bill.' No doubt about it, the Japanese
are the most courteous people in the world. We all know the glibness
with which the good Viennese interlard their speech with Bittschon
the Japanese use their own doso fully as frequently.

Hakata ! The name of that Japanese city is one which I cannot pos-
sibly forget, for there we were within a hair's breadth of disaster. I
was already over in China when it happened, making preparations for
our Shanghai visit and a tour through other parts of the Far East, so I
must rely on the account of my sons and assistants, particularly
Herbert's i4-mm. film record of the event.

There was a typhoon raging at Shanghai which, so the press in-
formed us, was moving off eastwards over the Yellow Sea, straight for
Kyushu, at the very hour when, as I reckoned, our performance was
just beginning. However, it struck more rapidly than calculated and
descended on the Fukuoka Peninsula, with its principal city of Hakata,
where we were at the time, and it was wonderfully good fortune for

170

DESTROYED BY TYPHOON

us that this occurred before the gates opened for the afternoon
performance.

Herbert's film showed the tractors clattering up, to drag the heavy
pantechnicons into position as a windbreak on the windward side of
the big tent, which was already flapping ominously in the mounting
wind. The steel covers of the carnivores' cage-wagons were closed,
the horses set loose. There was Foreman Hayaku waving his stick.
Then the tent peggers' hammers swung, and one seemed actually to
hear the blows as at feverish haste they drove in additional irons while
with blocks and tackle others tightened all guy ropes.

Higher and higher in the sky piled the menacing black wall of the
storm, a mountain of cloud, from behind the yellowish battlements of
which a terrible wind was now roaring. A few instants later, and over
the flags flapping wildly at the mast-heads there were torn trails of
cloud. Ropes fastened to our caterpillar tractors, the engines of which
were working, twanged tight as violin strings. And then it broke, with
incredible force.

My son he had been in bed all day with a touch of fever had been
taking his picture from the window of his wagon. Now he was
obliged to lie on the floor and hold tight. His wagpn was dancing
about as if on the high seas. The air was full of the cries of animals and
the crashing of timbers. Suddenly everything was engulfed in one
single whirling, howling cloud of dust.

When at last he could get up again and survey the scene, he took his
camera and filmed the result. Four thousand square metres of tattered
canvas were flapping high in the wind. Everything movable had been
blown away straw, poultry, linen, even the precious dragon curtain
given us by Nagoya the site was as cleanly swept of movable objects
as if a giant vacuum cleaner had been over it. It was all scattered far and
wide over the countryside. Our stabling had been smashed in as if it
had been a house of cards. The elephants were trumpeting madly to
get free. The horses, guided by instinct, their manes flying, had stood
the storm out with their backs to it. The four big steel masts were
whipping madly to and fro, as the wind caught in the remains of the
canvas and tore at them. Two plucky tenters who had once been
sailors shinned up top and slashed away ropes, so that the wind should
not continue to swell the broken canvas and tear at the anchorages.

The first voice to ring out over the ruins was Foreman Hayaku 's as
he rallied his men. Fortunately no one was hurt beyond a few minor
cuts and scratches, easily dealt with by adhesive plaster. Without

171

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

delay everybody set about clearing away the ruins. In the open, tent
makers got busy, slashing, patching. The stable tent was the first to be
restored. An army of helpers, paid and unpaid, joined in, hammering,
botching, making do hayaku, hayaku. Out came the Boy Scouts of
Hayaku and the surrounding country and gave volunteer aid. Local folk
offered quarters for men and animals alike. My sons were busy,
driving tractors, returning gate money, lending a hand wherever it was
wanted.

What was most remarkable was that not a plank, not a single
clown's wig or horse's feather plume was lost to us, even though car-
ried a mile away. Anything which in colour or shape looked like
Hagenbeck was brought in to us by the Japanese. Seeing the extent of
the disaster, nobody had dared to hope that we should soon get going
again, but no more than forty-eight hours after the storm all news-
papers and radio stations of Japan were announcing the news : *Hagen-
beck's Circus has resumed its performances, playing in the open air.'

Had we needed any additional boost to our publicity, we certainly
had it now. The Japanese poured in in their thousands. It was a remark-
able sight to see that huge amphitheatre so packed with people. Into
the air thrust the bare tent poles, with all the tackle of the aerial
acrobats. Down below was some staging, with our band, over it all
nothing but the cloudless sky of Japan.

The attendance was now so great that there were people offering
good yen merely to be allowed standing room, not in the circus area
proper, but merely inside the fence which surrounded our ground.
There were clusters of onlookers on the roof of every wagon, on every
ladder, on the masts, on the stacks of straw, and those who could not
see a thing still applauded delightedly whenever from the heat-
shimmering heart of that cauldron of humanity came sounds of
approval.

Sawade telegraphed to me in Shanghai : 'We are going on playing
now to sold-out houses without any tent.' For five days no less than a
round ten thousand people a day poured through the gate. In Japan,
the typhoon catastrophe and our conquest of destruction had become
a symbol of applied pluck. Nevertheless, performances had to come to
an end at last. At last, only two days' prolongation was feasible, for
at Osaka harbour a second Hapag steamer adapted as Noah's Ark was
already waiting for us. It was the s.s. Duisburg, and on September 29th,
1933, this ship took our circus from Kotobuki-Cho to Shanghai.

Leave-taking from our Japanese assistants, from our Boy Scouts and

172

DESTROYED BY TYPHOON

from many friends was moving. They would all have liked to go to
Shanghai too, but because of the political tensions of the moment it
was out of the question for us to take any Japanese workers with us to
China. Our departing stars were piled with presents invaluable dolls
in Japanese costume and other mementoes. Present at the last scene
were Consul Dr. Rhode, Professor Kanamura of the Kyoto Museum
and many other prominent persons. There were also the little cash-
desk geishas whom we were leaving behind, sorrowful little butter-
flies on the quayside, in their hands long paper ribbons, which still
bound them symbolically to Circus San who was now to leave them.
But they did not cry, for it is unworthy for a Japanese girl to show her
feelings. Instead, they were beaming with smiles. Behind us, as living
mementoes of our six months' stay on tour of Japan, we were also
leaving polar bears and those fairy-tale animals the giraffes, for Tokyo's
Ueno Park Zoo had made sure of those powerful attractions for itself.
One of those animals indeed was still living when, nineteen years later,
Mr. Koga, the zoo's director, came to see me at Stellingen to buy yet
more giraffes.

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MELANCHOLY TEA WITH MR. WONG

AT SHANGHAI my wife joined me, but it is rarely a great satisfaction to
be married to a circus manager, and instead of showing her this inter-
national metropolis of China I spent most of my time at the telephone.
Back in Germany work was going on round the clock to make us a
new big top, which was to come out to us by air. (At Osaka we had
made use of a spare tent fifty- two metres in diameter.)

Press and radio interviews followed one on another, and to show this
city of four million that despite the recent disaster, which had been
on everybody's lips, we had lost nothing of our former brilliance or
size, I wanted to kick off with a big procession. Meanwhile I kept
sending Heinrich, back at Stellingen, reassuring telegrams, for the
German press had carried into the remotest village of Germany the
news that the Hagenbeck Circus had been 'utterly destroyed by a
typhoon.' On the other hand, in nearly every bulletin Shanghai radio
was giving details of the position of the Duisburg.

The press, daily and weekly, had chartered a small hydroplane to
go out to meet our ark, and when the following morning the Duisburg
steamed up the river I was ready with the press on the quayside. That
morning the largest European newspaper in the Far East, the North
China Daily News, came out with a caricature which made all Shanghai
laugh. There was at the time a popular play going round the European
theatres out there. It was entitled Ships That Pass in the Night, and this
was the title of a cartoon by the popular cartoonist 'Sapajou.' On the
left one saw our ark arriving full of packed animals up to all sorts of
larks, while on the right was an outgoing steamer labelled 'Lord
Marley's Party,' with the lord himself and all his faithful about him
scowling up at the Duisburg, and holding their hands to their ears to
shut out the Homeric laughter of the creatures of the ark. The
point was that Lord Marley had been the leader of an inquiry
commission which was not exactly friendly to Germany, but in
the enthusiasm with which Shanghai awaited Hagenbeck' s Circus
his speeches had been lost, and that was why Lord Marley was
steaming away 1

174

MELANCHOLY TEA WITH MR. WONG

As if to supply the flood, if not before, at least after Hagenbeck's
ark reached its Ararat, just as the Duisburg berthed the heavens opened
their watery gates. No umbrella or goloshes could have availed against
what fell. Together with my reception committee, I was thoroughly
sluiced down. Speeches, procession and reception were all washed
away in the cloud-burst which followed. The best our band could do
was drain the water out of its instruments and slop along in oilskins
and sou* westers.

Together with our transport chief and Richard Sawade, 1 drove out
to the site set apart for us. The windscreen wipers laboured hard.
Shanghai's riverside front, the Bund, was empty and gleaming with
water. And here was the Majestic Ground, which we were to have,
where once the largest hotel of the Far East had stood. Some hours
previously it had certainly been terra firma, hard as a threshing
floor. Now one had the impression that all the water of Shanghai
had been drained there to make such an enormous volume of
swamp.

'Is it mud baths or a circus we are to open here?' demanded our
transport man, and under his gleaming sou'wester I had the distinct
impression that he leered. I, however, was in no mood for humour.
'No,' I remember shouting 'a switchback railway!' 'Very well, sir,'
he returned, 'it shall be ready by tomorrow evening,' and I had to
laugh, for if anybody could have brought off such a trick, it was that
man.

Ten hours later, and every man jack of that circus, whatever his
connection there, was on duty in the role of canal navvy. The whole
scene, inanimate and animate, was of the same loamy yellow hue.
Elephants and caterpillar tractors were wallowing in a sea of slime.
Four hundred loads of cinders and fifty wagons of rice straw had been
engulfed there, and still our trucks went down to their axles, to be
laboriously coaxed out by caterpillar tractors working on cord timber
tracks.

The atmosphere, in short, was indeed stormy, and the only man to
maintain his legendary, unshakable calm was Richard Sawade. There
he was, busily weighing up situations and issuing confident orders.
But when at last a break came, and our working elephants took
advantage of it to race trumpeting down into that sea of unrationed
mud and roll to their heart's delight, laughter returned, and the sun-
shine soon followed. The asphalt steamed, the pot-holes dried out,

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

and in a matter of hours what had been a sea of liquid mud was as hard-
baked as any farmer's threshing floor.

As cautiously as if it were his wife's most precious linen, our
transport man had our new tarpaulin spread out on the rice straw,
and woe betide any man who threatened to set his muddy hobnails on
it. We were going to be smart indeed. Between Osaka and Shanghai
there are a good eight hundred sea miles, and each of these had been
well utilised by Richard Sawade to get spit and polish back to our
storm-battered equipment." The very evening our tent arrived our
circus town was in place, with all its alleys among the wagons, its
menagerie section freshly washed and curried and combed, all gleam-
ing under the spider's web of festooned lights. Yes, Hatchimpa,
as the Chinese insisted on calling us, was ready to receive
Shanghai.

Gates open! clanged the bell from the paddock, and it was at once
as if a giant sluice had been opened to let in a yellow flood. The masses
crowded blindly in a sort of panic through the main entrance. Almost
immediately there were shrill whistles of warning from inside the
circus tent and cries to halt the human flood. Like sandbags against
flood waters bursting through a broken dyke, we flung everybody we
could into the breach stilt-walkers, book-keepers, lavatory atten-
dants, tamers. The black-uniformed International Police forced a
way through, tried to stop the human mass, but were swept aside
like match-boarding. The boxes reserved for the consuls and other
guests of honour of the various countries were at once occupied by
people who had only gallery and standing tickets, while the worthy
Li's and Chi's and all the middle-class mass were in hopeless
confusion.

Our ticket attendants did their best to get control. 'Don't push
there!' 'No rushing in!' 'This way, you numskull. 1 'Do you think a
half China dollar'll get you straight into the boss's box?' 'Take it
easy I' 'Steady there, steady!' 'Take it easy!' 'Open your tickets,
please!'

American tars from the cruiser Houston out in the river, a ship-full
of them, squeezed in, their little white caps standing out sharply
against the black mandarin caps of the Chinese. The elder Chinese all
looked like Confucius, with their horn-rimmed spectacles and wispy
beards. Each one worthier far than the other, they scurried past in
their green, steel blue or black silk cloaks, with young women in
tight-fitting silk gowns which corkscrewed up over their knees, and

176

^--SSlftll^ii

A ten-thousaml-hinner is transformed into a Noah's Ark. Loading the
s.s. Saarland at Hamburg, for Yokohama

Below: Clownish business under the jpgis of the Pyramids

1 Hagenbeck's, '
the round-the-
world circus,
in Japan

After the
yphoon at
Hakata
(Kyushu)

Performances
continued in
the open air

MELANCHOLY TEA WITH MR. WONG

older women with mutilated feet, hobbling, usually resting on the arm
of a son.

There were all races confused Japanese, Russians, the whole
International Settlement, a sprinkling of Indian Sikhs who with their
carefully brushed side-whiskers always reminded me of German
'commercial counsellors.' But at last, in surged the guardians of
public order and wherever the confusion became too great by dint of
sufficient taps on the head with their bamboo canes they established
decorum, and our circus settled down, packed like a great round
sardine-tin.

That Shanghai first night had been the maddest door-opening of my
whole circus life, and I was very glad indeed when the band struck up.
Then the approving whistles of the American sailors shrilled out in
the general applause, and Europe's circus art filled America and Asia
at once with enthusiasm.

In the first interval, one of my old hands came quietly up to me. .
'What be I to do with all thicky clogs outside?' he asked in his dialect.

'Clogs?' I asked. 'What clogs?'

He took me outside. I could hardly believe my eyes. The entrance
was littered with literally thousands of them, lost by the Chinese
when they stormed the entrance. One of our doorkeepers found the
solution, and the clogs were strung on ropes, so that when they came
out people could go along the line and pick what belonged to
them.

The next day there was the devil to pay, for when evening came
there was a still bigger crowd besieging the ground. The circus would
certainly not be able to hold half of them. But cautious Richard
Sawade had his plans ready. He brought up his elephants outside, and
posted them on either side of the entrance. 'They won't let anybody
tread on their corns !' cried our good manager with great enthusiasm.
The evening before he had suffered. A fine pair of patent-leather boots
had been ruined by hundreds of clogged feet treading on them ! Now
our stalwart Sikhs lined up with the elephants on either side, and there
was a little more order in it all. Nevertheless, once again it was not
long before from inside came whistles for help. The seating attendants
were at their wits' ends. The Chinese were just packing them-
selves in like books on shelves. Moreover, every man sitting down
held his knees firmly out, to make sure he kept his allotted
room.

Very soon it was discovered what was wrong. Holding two tickets

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12 AML

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

up to the light, one found that the serial numbers on some were
blacker than those of others. There were forged tickets going round! Like
vultures the criminal police pounced on the ticket offices. They soon
traced the forged tickets to No. 3. There was a simultaneous attack
from the back and front door of that office and the cheating attendant
got a merciless drubbing. All ticket sales had been taken on by a big
Chinese concern, and when they found that there had been cheating
outraged Chinese beat up the tricksters thoroughly. The forgers got a
second drubbing from the police, and a third from the Hatchimpa
doorkeepers. Shanghai proved a hot shop !

When our chief cashier made his daily trip to the bank with a valise
full of Chinese dollars he carried his valuable burden in a British
policeman's sidecar, with police motor-cyclists all round him, sub-
machine-guns slung round their necks ready. Shanghai could also be a
dangerous shop !

There were often noteworthy local celebrities to be seen at our
shows, men whom British secret police officers would point out to us.
'See that stout little fellow with the Chinese wife, yes, that one with
all the make-up, well, he's one we knew when he could not even
afford a ride in a ricksha, but look at him now!' But then, life is like
that, not only in the Far East.

One day, however, a regular troop of cars rolled up, and a well-
fleshed Chinese emerged from a limousine with bullet-proof glass as
thick as the ice on a skating rink, and round him a bodyguard of
twenty other Chinese, their eyes as wary as rats' all round. 'Mr.
Wong,' whispered our police friend. Mr. Wong, it seems, had re-
served twenty-one box seats, for it was only if he could be entirely
surrounded by his bodyguard that he thought he might be able to see
the circus in peace. He was one of the richest men in Shanghai, with
the influence of a Rockefeller. He had piled up millions, not on oil,
but opium.

The show began. The sea-lions did their stuff. Their motor-horn
'piano* was brought on. Heavens, what have I not heard on that instru-
ment. In the Rhineland it was 'The Faithful Hussar,' in Berlin 'Did
you then think . . .', in the Argentine 'La Cucaracha,' in Norway
'Lala Sunio* what now would it be in China? Of course, that most
popular of tunes, 'All the birds are already there,' played alike at
festivities and funerals, a German music-hall hit. How on earth that
ditty ever got out to the Far East and above all became so beloved by
the Chinese nobody could tell me.

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MELANCHOLY TEA WITH MR. WONG

About our performance, Mr. Wong was most enthusiastic. At
Aage, our Norwegian clown, he laughed till he cried. Aage could
manage his side-splitting entrance patter in a confusion of seven
languages, and that fell on fruitful soil in that Far Eastern crucible of
peoples, Shanghai. It was just after his entrance that the incident of
the funny chair took place.

Everybody surely knows this old circus trick, as old as the hills, but
a perennial favourite. Three men laboriously achieve an acrobatic
pyramid on a chair, but this suddenly collapses under them, the chair's
breaking being underlined by the ear-splitting detonation of a specially
planted cracker.

As I say, this was a very old circus turn but not for Mr. Wong's
bodyguard. The moment there was that apparent detonation of the
breaking chair from twelve coat pockets flashed twelve revolvers.
Our poor clowns had least of all expected that response, and it was a
good thing their alarm could not show through their heavy m^ke-up.
Meanwhile, Mr. Wong had dived for cover behind the matchboarding
of his box. Then up he bobbed again, very busily wiping his opera
glasses, as if he had merely bent down to pick them up !

Now a wave of laughter ran all round the great circus ring, while
wispy-bearded Chinese dignitaries turned the other way, pretending
not to have seen something so unseemly. But Mr. Wong gleamed like a
kindly Buddha. Shortly before the end of the show he suddenly slipped
out, though he was courteous enough not to leave without expressing
to me his personal thanks for such a well-spent evening and asking us
all to *a melancholy cup of tea* under his * unworthy roof.'

Let me say at once that this 'unworthy roof was the private city
which the Opium King had had built outside the Shanghai city gates.
According to what the British police told me, the story of his rise to
wealth was worth a whole library of thrillers. Now all that was be-
hind him, and at the top of his ladder he even looked virtuous.
Against any possible shades from the past, he had had his private city
built round with a high wall, from which trigger-easy guards loyally
kept watch on all who approached.

We drove out from Shanghai in twenty taxis as far as these could go,
then we took rickshas, after which we went on foot through the
loveliest Chinese park I have ever seen, with ornamental bridges,
miniature trees, cast-iron lions, by winding alleys, past lovely little
pools with goldfish and ornamental tortoises.

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ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

We were received on the terrace by Mr. Wong. He had now for-
gotten the five languages he spoke fluently in Shanghai, Arrayed in
costly dragon-patterned black silk, with family crest on breast and
back in silver, he greeted us in Chinese and left it to interpreters to
translate his words to the host of guests who were gaping in amazement
at the magnificence of his unworthy home. There were hanging vases
like storks' nests and carved and contorted haghes against the walls.
Silver and gold cups, tea-caddies, smoking- tables, richly ornamented
stools of ivory, costly bronzes, cats of porcelain, cats of gold, cobras
of silver, silver lamps, smokers* outfits and vases of joss sticks were
everywhere. Then the sonorous sounds of a gong called us to the
'melancholy cup of tea,' and we found that Mr. Wong had had a
separate palace built for every purpose one for eating, one for sleep-
ing, one for bathing, one for 'tea-drinking.' He had his own cinema
and his own theatre and, for the life of the spirit, his own temple
with red lacquer altars and a life-size alabaster statue of the
Buddha.

I still recall the fourteen kitchen-houses, the seven dwelling houses
of his wives, his children, his ancestors, the men of his bodyguard,
not to speak of the quarters for his priests, his officers, his servants.
The higher outer wall with its glazed tiles enclosed an estate larger
than the Stellingen Animal Park.*

Now we were no longer to be surprised when we discovered that
behind the 'cup of melancholy tea* was concealed a repast of precisely
forty- five courses, served at numerous small low-pitched tables, each
with six small stools round it. First, as hors-d'ceuvre, came ham,
mushrooms, goose liver, titbits of roast fowl, with soya sauce, toasted
almonds, and sunflower seeds. Then there were soups of mushrooms,
of fish and of eggs. Next came stuffed boned pike, stewed swallow-
nests, roast duck, roast fowl, the meat all cut into tiny pieces, so that
one only needed two chopsticks to take it from one's plate. With
these foods came a variety of dainties in little dishes-^-caviare, shark's
fins, sliced and seasoned Chinese radish and bamboo shoots, and finally
sucking-pig 1 In rustled the servants, scarce audible, and then be-
tween a double row of them came ten cooks, each with a roast
sucking-pig on a silver dish, complete with wonderful garnishing.
Each cook carried his pig to a table, and when the guests there had
luxuriated sufficiently in the aroma of it all, he vanished again, to
return a few moments later with it all sliced and cut up small. There
* Over seventy-five acres. Translator.

1 80

MELANCHOLY TEA WITH MR. WONG

were hot puddings and cold sweet cakes of many kinds, with black
coffee and brandy to round off this gluttonous Chinese dinner. Of
course, during the meal itself nothing but champagne was served.

Understandably, after such a filling we found no great difficulty in
following the ancient custom of the country and expressing our
appreciation and praise of his cooks to our host by loud
belching.

* Mr. Wong's wives did not take any part in the banquet. On the
other hand, some of the womenfolk of our company had already had
the opportunity of meeting them in a tea-house. Our equestrienne in
particular told me that she had taken tea with the kdies and smoked
a pipe of opium, or, rather, tried to, for the thing, she said, just would
not burn, for smoking opium is an art which requires considerable
know-how. There was, she said, little conversation, as these Chinese
women knew no foreign languages. They fanned themselves, smiled
most graciously and on their forefingers all wore diamonds as large as
hazel nuts.

After the great meal, Mr. Wong's actors made great efforts to
show their European colleagues Chinese vaiihi on their open-air
stage. As my present to Mr. Wong I had sent two rare white humped-
back swans. He returned the compliment with a goose, the Cygnopsis
ygnoides, which in Chinese belief is the primordial goose from which
all other geese have been bred.

I was happy to have such good relations with the Shanghai police,
for we needed them nearly every day for going to the bank, and some-
times for other reasons. For instance, one day a guanaco vanished. At
about six one morning a man came to the 'exotic animals' ' stables,
made out that he was a veterinary surgeon, and intimated that he had
come to take away 'the sick guanaco.' The police radio came into
action (all police cars in Shanghai already had radio receivers at this
time), the net was at once cast wide, and the creature was found on
the seventh floor of a skyscraper on the counter of a bar I A dead-
drunk American had been trying in vain to get whisky into it. When
our people arrived, the animal was still on the counter, but the culprit
was senseless on the floor nearby. It must have been a mere prank,
but there was one good side to it it made a wonderful story for the
Shanghai press, which meant five Chinese, four English, three Japan-
ese, two Russian, one French and one German newspaper, all of
which spread the tale that our guanaco had made the thief faint by
suddenly dancing the Charleston on the counter 1

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ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

The guanaco was not the only animal we had brought away from
Japan with us. We also had a Korean leopard, some giant Kamschatkan
bears, valuable cranes and, among other things, the 'maidenhair
tortoise,' which is in point of fact merely a tortoise with a seaweed
growth on its shell, a strange example of parasitism.

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A MAHARAJA FILLS THE HOUSE

FOR A run of sixty nights the sky above the Majestic Ground glowed
red with the flood of light from our circus town. But long before this
time was up I had packed my bags and moved on. The s.s. Tjibadak
took my wife and me via Manila to Java, my original plan being after
China to take our circus on tour through the Straits Settlements and
Dutch East Indies to Australia. But whereas the financial authorities
of Japan and Shanghai had both nobly taken account of our huge costs
and refrained from taxing the circus, the Dutch colonial government,
on the other hand, without a blush demanded a twenty-five per cent,
entertainment tax. I had not had to pay their counterparts back in
Amsterdam even a half of that amount.

'But it's the public that will pay the tax,' argued the finance boss
of Batavia.

'Granted/ I said, 'but it's you who are going to pocket it. Perhaps
you would explain where the money is coming from to pay our freight
costs to Australia?'

For these reasons our proposed tour through the Dutch East Indies
never materialised, and thereby, because of the long sea voyage, the
visit to Australia also fell through. The very next day after this de-
cision, what the Java-Bode press had nicknamed the 'breathless
globe-trotter' sailed on the s.s. Johan van Oldenbarneveh for Singapore,
Colombo and Calcutta. On the voyage, the ship's photographer de-
veloped the films I had turned. While in Japan I had visited various
zoos, and of course I had also gone to see whatever Manila and Java
could show me. But it was particularly in the small Japanese zoos,
which I had been advised to miss (because 'they have nothing to
show') that I came upon many a zoological rarity, especially in the
worlds of birds, reptiles and fishes. Of all of these the Japanese are
masterly breeders, and in their country I was able to make many an
interesting purchase or exchange.

While at Shanghai I had heard that the Chinese province of Kwangsi
possessed a special variety of pheasant. So I sent the aviator Hannes
Rathje in search of this. (This was of course the Hannes Rathje who
made his name by his long-distance flight from Berlin to Peking.

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ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

Today he counts as the oldest pilot of the new German Lufthansa, and
a well-known 'aerial millionaire 1 who piled up thousands of air miles
in the Far East.) At last, about eleven hundred miles from Shanghai,
in Szechwan, he acquired for me four of these marvellous blue-eared
pheasants and also a specimen of the rare crop-gazelle.

During this voyage to India I was also able at leisure to run through
the films I had turned at Manila and Weltevreden. Of the greatest
interest to me was an elephant I photographed at Manila. Through an
accident the animal was minus the tip of its trunk. What is more, this
was slit at the end for about a span on either side. I am afraid I was
unable to find out or the owners were unwilling to tell me how this
mutilation came about, but what was most interesting was to observe
that the accident had not prevented the elephant from using its trunk,
for I saw and the cameras recorded how neatly he slipped bananas
into that slit and conveyed them to his mouth, a fascinating piece of
evidence of the extraordinary adaptability of this 'hand on the head,'
which is said to contain between twenty-five thousand to thirty
thousand separate muscles.

While the Johan van Oldenbarneveh called at Colombo, we visited
my Uncle John, and during an excursion to Kandy we had a very
amusing experience. When the mahouts saw his familiar face and
heard what visitors he had brought out, they put their elephants
through a number of tricks. The tricks were the same as those per-
formed in our circus. Among the elephant-riders of Ceylon were now
men who had learned their job under us at Stellingen ! They had also
essayed their training skill on some monkeys, and at a word of com-
mand these clambered at lightning speed up coconut palms, picking
the fruit and throwing it down to us. The milk of coconuts fresh from
the tree like that is a wonderful form of refreshment.

At the Consulate- General at Calcutta a regular pile of letters and
telegrams awaited us. The management of the Grand Hotel found me
an Indian girl secretary, a clever young Parsee, who besides the
language of Zarathustra knew shorthand and typewriting excellently.
In no time my room was transformed into a circus office, from which,
carried by our billposting team, the word went out to all India.

The circus at the moment was somewhere in the Straits of Malacca.
Captain Engell and the officers of the Saarland had first been able to
see our performances only at Shanghai, for immediately their ship had
discharged us at Yokohama she was ordered back to Hamburg. On her
second journey out, in addition to Christmas mail and many presents,

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A MAHARAJA FILLS THE HOUSE

she brought our sea-lions refrigerators-full of much-longed-for fish,
fresh from the Altona fish market.

After three weeks' voyage our original Noah's Ark thus brought the
circus up the Ganges, and when we gave our first Indian performance
all that stood for anything in Calcutta by name or rank was present.
Among the audience was to be seen Lady Willingdon, wife of the
British Viceroy. But most heads in the audience were turbaned. Our
seating attendants were many a time driven to despair; there were so
many cases of people who would not sit next to, or immediately under,
or immediately above certain others, even though they might have
paid the same price to get in each considered the other to be un-
clean. For India's castes were still strictly observed, even determining
where one should sit at a circus show.

During the interval I took my British guests to see the menagerie.
The harness hanging down the gangways past the stables was gleaming
bright, and there was clean straw in all the boxes. When a certain
cavalry general spotted the cleanings of the curry combs always
looked at by the officer in charge of Army stables to see how well the
horses have been cleaned down he cried enthusiastically: 'I shall
send some of my dragoons round here tomorrow to learn the real
meaning of cleanliness and speed I '

At the same time, he invited me to a military tattoo to be held the
very next evening, and there I saw the British cavalry show their skill,
indeed an impressive spectacle, well carried through to the strains of
a military band. Lit by a blazing square of torches, it was well cal-
culated to excite the marvel of all present.

Here at Calcutta we were to give the rarest circus performance
that ever took place under our big top. It was like this : one day an
imposing Indian gentleman presented himself at our box office and
politely inquired how much he would have to pay for the whole
seating.

'I beg your pardon,' said the man at the desk, thinking he had not
heard aright. But the Indian repeated his question. Yes, he wanted all
the seats, at once, he said, and he drew out his cheque book. Whether
he was a millionaire, or just potty, was not clear to our box office
attendant, so he beckoned to a porter and had the inquirer taken
round to see me.

The inquirer introduced himself. He was the private secretary of
the Maharaja of Patiala, and yes, he repeated, he did wish to hire the
whole seating for one show, and making out a cheque for the total

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

sum he handed it across my desk, requiring of me an assurance that
the whole programme would be shown, with no cuts, to one party
only: his employer the Maharaja and the Maharaja's party.

'Very well, sir, it shall be done,' we said, and decided on the day.
Only then I discovered that there were one or two little arrangements
still to be made. For the ladies of the harem were in strict purdah,
as the Indians call it, and there could be no relaxation of the rigid
rule by which no male eye should see them. To safeguard this neces-
sitated a little preparation, and we watched the private secretary
make a tour of inspection of the whole tent. He paced out distances
and jotted them down. He also measured the width and depth of the
various boxes and gangways. He even climbed up to the gods and
peered down. Then he grovelled on the floor, to peep under the edge
of the side flaps of the wall of the tent. What he discovered there I
do not know, but he certainly jotted it all down. One might have
thought he intended to do our transport superintendent out of a job
and put up the tent himself at our next town.

The day of the special performance came round, and suddenly
up rolled a big lorry, and twenty turbaned Indians unloaded red-
painted iron posts and drove them into the ground while others
carried muslin-stretched wooden frames into the tent. When they
had finished their operations, a section of the boxes had been com-
pletely screened off, and from this walled-off section led a completely
closed-in corridor. This was rather like the covered gangway used to
bring lions and tigers to their central cage and led all the way to the
entrance to our circus enclosure.

The next step was the introduction of the bodyguard seventy
Indian colossi from the mountains of Bengal, in colourful uniforms,
took up positions at all exits and on all stairs. They stood as stiffly as
tin soldiers, their arms crossed over their breasts. Then came fourteen
heavily silvered Rolls-Royce limousines, all with their blinds fully
drawn. Beside the driver of each sat a regular Goliath of a Sikh.
These, their faces well averted in turn, raised the flap of the muslin
tunnel, for the unseeable beauties to scurry into the circus.

The Maharaja himself offered the diametrical opposite of all this
Indian ceremonial, for he turned up in a bright grey double-breasted
suit of the latest cut and a well-turned Oxford accent, all transported
in a silver-grey German Maybach sports car matching his suit. With
lively chatter, he accompanied me inside, A nod, and the bandmaster
raised his baton. We began.

1 86

A MAHARAJA FILLS THE HOUSE

The Maharaja was most enthusiastic and clapped heartily, though
the sound echoed rather hollow and ghostly from the four thousand,
nine hundred and seventy empty seats. Out of the draped boxes of the
purdah ladies came not a sound. My august guest kept up a fire of
questions about all that interested him. In came our clowns, sweating
with anxiety. For how can one make jokes in the ring without any
applause? It was as hard as telling a deaf and dumb man a joke. For this
reason the boys had had resort to the time-honoured recipe of the
water entry. In their version, it consisted of a clown, two dumb
Augusts, twenty- three tubs of water and an apparently touchy master
of the horse, over whose frock-coat the missing twenty-fourth tub of
water is spilled. This act had raised salvoes of laughter from Oslo to
Rio de Janeiro, for the most carefree delight in the world is malicious
delight, particularly when it results from seeing a whole tub of water
poured over the head of a bad-tempered gentleman. Thrice the
Maharaja wiped the tears of laughter from his eyes, for thrice this
watery battle with the malice of things had to be repeated, and every
time there came silvery peals of laughter from the invisible memsahib
in her muslin cage.

Now came our own little pleasure. Of everything had that most
circumspect private secretary thought, except the trapeze. He had
not gone up on that to spy out what he could see from there, so our
heroes of the air did at least get a fleeting glimpse of the unveiled
beauties. Fortunately for us, their august lord and master never
realised what sacrilege was being committed above his turban.

However, what caused the real sensation was Rudolf Matthies'
Royal Tigers. Every year thousands of Indians fall victims to the lord of
the jungle. Whenever one of these man-eaters reduces a district to
terror and anxiety, heavy rewards are offered to anyone who can kill
the beast. But now the Maharaja and his family saw a slender young
man in snow-white tropical frock-coat surrounded by fourteen
magnificent tigers in the central cage, and the animals obeyed his
every word, leapt through flaming hoops and posed in tiers for him as
if really anxious to have their photographs taken. The ladies had never
seen anything so impressive, and in order to get a better view of that
charming young man from Hamburg, they actually tore quite large
peep-holes in their harem curtains, so that when with profound bows
our brave Rudolf responded to the final applause he really did not
know whether those were fiery diamonds flashing at him from the
muslin wall or the bright eyes of the purdah ladies.

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ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

Shortly after this, as the guest of the Maharaja of Mayurbhanj, I
took part in an elephant-catching expedition. The animals were not
caught by trapping in pits, a method which years before had been
practised by our animal catcher Walther Ebert in Sumatra, nor was it
the capture of single young elephants, in East African style. The whole
thing would be far better described as a big social event, in which
Indian princes, high government officials and other guests took part.
It cost the hosts a fortune. For months in advance roads had been cut
through the untamed forest, so that the guests might be able to drive
or ride in their elephant howdahs in comfort to the bungalows
specially built for them near the hunting ground, for the Maharaja
provided a comfortable little bamboo house for each guest and his
many servants.

In splendid tents, spread with the choicest rugs and animal skins,
servants served a range of dishes which the Waldorf-Astoria could not
have surpassed in richness or variety, and whether one's whim was for
White Horse whisky, a vintage claret or a Rhine wine, the white-
clad waiters were ready to supply it. I was particularly struck by the
huge entrance gateway to this princely camping site, for this was made
exclusively of the tusks with which tremendous Indian bull elephants
had once cleared their path through the jungle. I measured the biggest
of these, and found it to be seven feet five inches long. At its root, the
circumference was sixteen and a half inches. The longest tusk ever
known in India was only fourteen inches longer than this one.

However, the African elephant has far larger tusks, and it is for this
reason that in circuses and zoos people so often ask why it is that we
'saw off the elephants' tusks.' Though there is nothing new in it for
the specialist, I think I should once again give the answer. This is that
in all the circus rings of the whole world it is principally Indian cow
elephants which perform, and these have no tusks naturally, merely a
small protuberance which is only visible when the animal raises its
trunk. On the other hand, the African cow elephant has tusks rang-
ing in the main from eleven to thirty-three pounds in weight, while
the African bulls have tusks of up to at least two hundred pounds each.
But the greater weights are now rare, which is why the tusk weighing
about one hundred and fifty pounds which the British Colonial Service
officers sent the Prince of Wales as a wedding present was regarded as
outstanding. But when it comes to tusks like those which in 1878
C. G. Schillings photographed in Zanzibar ivory market, I envy any-
body who may have the opportunity of seeing such tuskers at liberty.

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A MAHARAJA FILLS THE HOUSE

For in the course of the last century these largest of all animals have
been nearly wiped off the face of the earth, just because civilised
mankind thinks billiards would not be billiards if not played with balls
made from their tusks. The lack of tusks in the Indian elephant is one
of the principal reasons why this has not been destroyed to anything
like the same extent as the African species.

Now we are talking of elephants, I shall also give the answer to an-
other oft-repeated question the one about the legendary * elephant
cemeteries.' This report, if we can thus describe pure fantasy, is a
perennial one in the press, but seems so astonishing that one wonders
why the people who tell it have never taken pick and shovel themselves,
for they might well have come back from Africa as ivory millionaires.
For, according to what they all tell us, the elephant is an animal which,
in obedience to an instinctive drive, when he feels his end is nigh
follows a given path which leads him to the 'well-known* elephant
graveyard, to which all old or mortally ill elephants have 'always* gone
to end their lives. The cemetery attendants are vultures, and at the
end only the ivory is left! This ivory elephant tusks piles up
gradually, to form stores of treasures only awaiting the man to take it
away.

As far as my own research has shown, the truth would be on the
following lines. Elephants, as far as I have been able to judge by my
specimens at Stellingen, live just about as long as men, and exception-
ally reach an age corresponding to that of a very old man. In their
declining years, most of them suffer from a progressive weakening of
the trunk. This is critical for them, for they eventually reach the stage
of being unable to lift their food to their mouths, and can only swing
it in. By this time drinking becomes a trying business, for, as every-
body knows, elephants drink by first sucking water into their trunks,
then squirting it into their mouths. Thus, to conquer their thirst,
ageing elephants are at last reduced to drinking as they did as mere
sucklings, when they tucked their little trunks back and drew their
milk from their mother's dugs straight into the mouth. But to be able
to suck water straight into their mouths like that they have to wade
deep enough into a lake, and our animal catchers have told me that
they have often seen old elephants doing this in Lake Chad.. But
eventually the day comes when the aged creature, weak, perhaps
mortally ailing or wounded, suddenly no longer has the strength to
get out of the water again. The river or the swamp or the lake becomes
its grave. The many carrion-eaters which exist on land, in the air and

189

ANIMALS ARE

in the water then take over. And the tusks? These are left in the mud
of the bottom. Perhaps when the waters are in flood they are swept
away elsewhere, but I am quite ready to believe that in the neighbour-
hood of elephants' watering-places numbers of tusks have been found
together. But there is in this no question of 'elephant cemeteries.'

But let us return to our muttons, or, rather, to our Indian ele-
phants those we were to catch. Eventually some three thousand
beaters appeared on the scene, and with torches and home-made
grenades these men drove a herd of wild elephants into a corral.
Meanwhile, as if at the races, we sat on comfortable tiered ranks of
seats and watched the doings, while skilled mahouts aided by working
elephants proceeded to catch, chain and tether those wild cousins.

I kept my cine camera ready all the time, and was able to capture
the moment when a magnificent bull used all the might of his twenty
summers against the portcullis closing behind him. He caught that
two-and-a-half- ton timber gate and raised it on his tusks. While it
was still poised crooked, he then thrust himself out under it with an
agility which most people would never have thought so ponderous a
monster could achieve, though one who had often seen a seven- ton
elephant nimbly duck under a low courtyard gateway would not have
found it so surprising. (I should record that three days later that
escapee was caught again.)

To tether a newly captured elephant India has evolved a very simple
device. A way out of the corral led into a sort of sluice, and into this
the working elephants shouldered and pressed their untamed com-
rade on whom the portcullis had closed. So there he was, in the nar-
row space of those walls, which, however, except for the corner
posts, did not reach the ground. Through the available space it was
not difficult for the mahouts to get chains on the elephant's legs with-
out being trampled underfoot.

Once reconciled to its fate, the elephant soon eats the food thrown
to it, though it is still for a time dangerous to go near, as, for instance,
when watering it. But here too India has worked out a surprisingly
simple solution. They had hollowed out a tree-trunk with fire and this
was thrust into the animal's quarters, to provide a simple and quite
safe way of watering him without getting within reach of his dangerous
trunk.

There was one Maharaja with whom I concluded a fine exchange
at his suggestion. India has many elephants, but no German police
dogs, so I exchanged one of these for an elephant. At that time more

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A MAHARAJA FILLS THE HOUSE

than one Maharaja had his zoo, and all of them showed great interest
in our menagerie. I still remember clearly a visit paid me by the
Princes of Baroda and Talcher. One of them bought giraffes from us. I
was paid in elephants, which I took back to Germany when the circus
went.

When, a few years ago, the social-political position in India re-
duced the power and the revenues of the maharajas, we received a
letter from India informing us that, obliged to get rid of his elephant
stables, the writer offered us ten good tuskers (i.e. bull elephants),
trained and * road-safe.' Unfortunately, it was 1947, and we had
neither shipping facilities nor foreign currency to be able to acquire
the elephants of the dethroned maharaja.

I cannot take leave of Calcutta without thinking of three incidents :
Christmas in the ring, the visit of the crew of the German cruiser
Karlsruhe, and the earthquake.

Never before had I seen quite so sweaty a Santa Claus as the one who
under the heat of arc lights dealt out the mountains of mail from home
and our presents to one hundred and twenty circus folk. Rarely either
have I seen such enthusiastic seamen as those men of the Karlsruhe,
for whom this meeting with us was a really joyous event. And though
in the first few moments I took that earthquake for a practical joke,
I shall certainly never forget it. It caught me by surprise in the throes
of dictating my daily mail. Suddenly my office wagon began to rock,
and, being convinced that it was some of our folk at their tricks, I
tore the curtain back and had some rather pungent things to say.
Then, to my dismay, I suddenly saw the whole circus quiver like a
big mould jelly. Water slopped out of the sea-lions' tanks, and there
was the sound of shattering glass. The afternoon papers told us that it
had been only the outer waves of a big earthquake, which at the centre
destroyed twenty thousand houses, and just touched Calcutta.

At last, one morning, our circus trains started on a five-day tour
through India. From Calcutta we went to Bombay, a first leap of
one thousand eight hundred and forty miles. Journalists have often
asked me if it would not have been easier to have chartered the
Saarland for our whole world tour. The answer is that it certainly
would have been, had we not had to pay peppery-hot harbour dues
for every hour the ship was not in motion, merely in dock. To that
would have been added the maintenance costs of a ten-thousand-ton
ship, not to speak of keeping its crew all the time.

My wife and I had travelled on to Bombay in advance of our circus.

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I had had the circus ground cleaned up and disinfected. There was a
Danish caterer at Bombay who prepared a reception lunch for the
whole of our company. He made mutton and cabbage cooked in
German fashion the piece de resistance, and the Indians were most
astonished that I myself the sahib of it all should sit down with my
'underlings' and join in with them with great appetite. In India such
behaviour was incomprehensible. There were, of course, many things
that never caused an Indian the least surprise which our folk found
very puzzling, but there were certainly at the same time many things
which we would have thought should occasion no surprise whatsoever
in India yet which the Indians who came to our shows found most
puzzling.

1 Sahib, please, tell me, how can any man be so strong as to let a
whole elephant lie on him without crushing him?'

This referred to a turn which our elephant tamer put on. In this
item the trick was one totally devoid of danger. It was based quite
simply on the shape of an elephant. Owing to the conformation of its
bulky body, a man lying down close to one of the front legs which an
elephant stretches out when it lies down automatically has just
enough room to lie there without being in the least squeezed. It is of
course a trick turn and nothing more a trick calculated to deceive
people who do not know elephants. But surely, we thought, that
should not have surprised Indians, who see elephants from infancy?

The fact is, in Germany one is inclined to imagine that every
Indian is in some measure an elephant expert. In reality, a Bombay
shopkeeper knows just as little about elephants as a Hamburg ship's
chandler knows about pedigree Holstein cows. There was another
prize question which was put to me in Bombay which could have been
as well answered at Leipzig or Pirmasens. This was : What sort of rare
animals were those which swam like fish but barked like dogs? These,
of course, were our acrobatic sea-lions, which, alas, always have the
misfortune of being confused with seals by the layman.

192

The Royal Tiger's incisors arc ra/.or-sharp

Tiger trainer Rudolf Matthies at work. The tiger in this picture
is leaping through an eighteen-inch hoop

NO PIASTRES FOR HAGENBECK

AT BOMBAY the circus had a full two months 1 run. Then it had to be
goodbye to India. I had sent our carpenters and fitters on to Colombo,
where they constructed the stabling quarters we needed in the s.s.
Kanak, which was to take the circus on to Egypt. When however the
Kanak arrived to take Hagenbeck's on board, I had already gone on
ahead, with my two managers, but since the excitements of a voyage
on a passenger steamer certainly cannot measure up to those of a
Noah's Ark circus, I had perhaps better relate some hearsay, not about
feeding the animals or training the performers, who of course erected
their trapezes and horizontal bars on deck for daily training and prac-
tice, but about their pranks. For when such an international assembly
of clowns, snake-charmers and animal tamers are condemned to the
dolcefar nicntc of a voyage there is no holding them down.

Rudolf Matthies had a magnificent tiger, which he had himself
reared on the bottle, and this animal used to follow him about on the
lead like a dog. One day, in the Indian Ocean, Rudolf was taking his
little afternoon constitutional on the promenade deck when through
the window of a deck cabin came a great din and clatter of glasses. By
the sounds of it, the party was getting a little out of hand. So Matthies
let out his big pussy's lead a little, and like any other inquisitive cat
Shango, as he was called, reared on his hind legs, resting his paws on
the sill and poked his massive head inside. In an instant there was a
deathly silence inside and the noisiest of the company was as still as a
mouse. When at last the spook vanished again and it gradually dawned
on the bedimmed brains what it had been, they probably tasted their
drink better again.

Late one night Martell, still in charge of our poster brigade, thought
he would have one last dive in the swimming bath rigged on deck, but
unfortunately overlooked that at night the bo'sun always drained this.
The result was a head-first crash on the canvas-covered floor of the
pool, in which there was by then only a foot of water left. Martell's
companions of the bottle rushed in horror to his assistance. But he
was already on his feet. With a grand flourish he drew out his pocket
watch on its famous elastic chain, glanced quizzingly at it, and as if

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quite unconcerned, despite the swelling visibly rising on his fore-
head, cried: 'Good night, gentlemen, good night, it has just turned
seventeen minutes past two.'

At the entrance to the Suez Canal the ship found a gathering of
Japanese, Norwegian and Dutch ships, all waiting for their passage
permits. Men-of-war had priority, after them came mail packets. As
we found waiting tedious we had rejoined the Kanak we had our-
selves set ashore, and by a five-hour motor-car journey through the
desert reached the Egyptian frontier post, where a green-uniformed
soldier from the Sudan distinguishing mark, three deep scars
diagonally across a black ebony face ran through our pockets in
search of drugs. Capsules of hashish had already been found by the
keen desert police even in the stomachs of dromedary caravans, com-
ing in from the desert and serving as smuggling vehicles for the pro-
hibited drug.

From the sand-covered frontier zone we had a good view, looking
down on the glittering broad ribbon of the Nile. Far ahead, out of the
lush green of the Nile Delta, the pointing fingers of the mosque
minarets thrust from the flood of houses into the blue skies it was
Cairo. The rough desert road here changed to smooth asphalt, border-
ed by out-of-town villas and gardens, thicker and thicker as we drew
near to the principal city of Egypt.

The red fez with its black tassel the so-called tarboosh dominat-
ed the appearance of the streets. It was more than a form of headgear,
it had become a national symbol. At the very first cup of black coffee,
we found ourselves deep in political talk. A young member of the
'Piastre Movement/ which was strong at the time, told us that the
money they collected in piastres had gone to found a fez factory.
Apparently till shortly before this all Egypt's red fezes had come from
Czechoslovakia. Away over there, in Turkey, Kemal Pasha had pro-
hibited the wearing of the fez, but here it was being made a nationalist
party symbol.

This fez-wearing movement was directed against Britain, and where-
ever the flood of nationalist sentiment broke its banks British armoured
cars rattled through the streets, in an attempt to teach the young fez-
wearers who was really the boss. Besides Egyptians and British, in
Cairo also lived Syrians, Maltese, Armenians, Greeks, French and
Italians, while beside Moslems and Christians there were also many
Jews. And, to show that all these national groups were still not, so to
speak, all under one tarboosh, the Jews, just as our circus was being

NO PIASTRES FOR HAGENBECK

swung by the harbour cranes down on to this politically hot soil, now
came out with a battle-cry of their own: 'Not a piastre for the
Hagenbeck Circus !'

Never before in my life had I drunk so many cups of black coffee as
I did in those Cairo days, which we spent mainly in Egyptian minis-
tries and other official places and in editorial offices. There was no end
to the task of removing ever-new obstacles to our tour. Even our
potential audience was split into factions. The students were against
Britain. Nahas Pasha was against King Fuad. Country youth were en-
thusiastic about the Crown Prince Farouk. (Farouk was then still as
lean as a rake !) Our aim was to put on a show for them all, but we had
to mind our p's and q's not to lose popularity either through a false
note in our bill of lading or a false note in the pieces played by our
brass band.

At last all was in order, the preliminaries were over, and our circus
army began its peaceable march of conquest through Egypt. Our
clowns rode on the necks of our elephants to the pyramids at Gizeh,
and I doubt whether the Sphinx ever saw anything funnier than the
impromptu show given there that day.

A remarkable string of caravans moved in to the opening show in
our town of tents, peasant families riding in on their donkeys from
the surrounding villages. Nomads came swaying on their camels.
Among them were to be seen antique Fords, chugging busily along,
vehicles brought long since by fate by who can tell what adventure-
some roads to be the bargain pieces of the desert. Shoe-cleaners,
wandering pedlars and dragomans poured in with the crowds.

From the first day the black-uniformed desert police, commanded
by remarkably lean British officers, were openly on our side. The only
time we saw them intervene in the ideological conflicts was when the
King's opponent, Nahas Pasha, decided to come to a show and anti-
regime demonstrations were to be expected.

'At the first cry of "Down with the King!" * laughed a police
major, 'we shall cut in/ Eloquently he cracked his long crocodile-
hide whip.

'Yes/ I remarked, 'and that's just where things will get out of
hand and all our seating arrangements will be upset 1*

The police chief thought twice of his impetuosity. Very well, he
said, there would be no beating up in the circus. But he assured us that

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

we could count our programme off if the crowds gave Nahas Pasha
any sort of ovation. Our programme did indeed turn into a sort of
background to the many bursts of applause for the distinguished visitor.
Indeed, that evening the seating seemed to have been taken exclusively
by fanatics. But the following day the Crown Prince Farouk's friends
had their counter-show, the only difference being that as the young
peasants who were his supporters could afford only the cheaper seats
the affair on this occasion was mainly confined to the gallery. The
youthful Crown Prince himself was most enthusiastic about our show.
It was the first circus he had ever seen. He honoured some of the per-
formers by summoning them to his box and saluting them, hand to
fez!

While in Egypt, I was also put in rather a spot in matters of circus
etiquette by ex-King Alfonso VIII of Spain, who combined a hunting
expedition in the Upper Sudan with a visit to Carl Hagenbeck's show.
In the case of Nahas Pasha's visit it had all been a matter of tact, namely
whether any public honour done to Nahas Pasha would not hurt the
feelings of the King. Now it was a question of music. I had my band-
master asking me for he was worried about whether he would be
able to get hold of the score what anthem he was to play I

In Egypt a circus man certainly needed to have a keen eye to all the
political tangles. Many a time we ground our teeth, many a time a lot
of dust was flung in our eyes. Nor is this to be taken only politically,
for from time to time we were overcome by sandstorms. Hot clouds
of the stuff then poured in through every possible crevice. One's eyes
became inflamed, nose and ears were full of it. Together with Nile
water, it is these sandstorms which are blamed for all the eye disease
of Egypt. Rarely have I seen so many people suffering from ophthalmia
and even blindness as in the streets of Egypt.

However, the last sandstorm we saw was one released especially in
our honour by the City Commandant of Cairo. That worthy was so
impressed by our circus cavalry, and the performance of the famous
Casi Italian riding group in particular, that he asked us out to Helio-
polis to see a parade of his own mounted desert police. Cane chairs
were provided for us on the edge of the field of operations and we
were loaded with compliments, while Nubian orderlies brought round
drinks and cigarettes. A squadron of black-uniformed lancers on
lovely white Arab mounts then took the salute, their bright yellow
leather and reddish-yellow lance pennants making a picture to excite
the enthusiasm of any horseman. Next, the Bimbashi, or Major, gave a

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NO PIASTRES FOR HAGENBECK

command, and, riding level as a line drawn with a ruler, the cavalcade
galloped shoulder to shoulder down on us.

The cavalry exercises under the scorching sun of Africa which fol-
lowed were accompanied by the clamour of trumpets. To wind up,
the order to charge was given and the squadron stormed down on us
with thundering hoofs. The very earth shuddered till our lemonade
glasses danced on the tables. Vast dense clouds of dust rose, spreading
till everything except the glittering points of the lances was enveloped.
When at last it cleared, I turned, to find myself blinking into the face
of the Bimbashi, who now seemed most pleased with himself. I
invited him and his men to our show. He accepted, but on condition
that his dark-skinned musicians should first show their gratitude by
giving a concert in the ring. Those lancers made our big top ring with
the most spirited Prussian marches that it had ever heard !

The Bimbashi beamed like the glorious sunshine itself, and his rays
reached even as far as Alexandria, where the attempt to get us
boycotted flared up again. But by reason of three hundred lancers
distributed in the sand dunes round about, the attempt failed. At
Alexandria, our linguistic wonder, Aage, the Norwegian clown, won
tremendous applause whenever he greeted the Alexandrians princi-
pally Greeks who filled the seats every evening with 'Kalispera'
'Good evening.'

A fortnight later, we inaugurated our Spanish tour at Barcelona.
The revolution which heralded the three years' civil war then just
developing had shaken the whole country. While we were at
Zamora a general strike broke out and not a man would touch a tool.
The military commandant offered us the aid of Spanish army units to
set up our tents, but I thanked him and declined the offer, for though
the help would indeed have been welcome, I certainly did not want to
set the strikers against us and we managed by ourselves, musicians,
performers and tamers all helping, an effort which impressed every-
body. At the same time I impressed on our folk that they were not to
utter a single critical word, and I must put it on record that, though
we had fourteen nationalities among us, not one got out of step in any
one of the twenty-six cities of Spain, including Madrid, in which we
gave performances.

However, partly owing to the revolutionary ferment, partly also
to the incredible poverty of the people, we could not earn sufficient
pesetas in Spain. Though during performances friends and foes sat
side by side under the one tent roof, as the weeks went by one could

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ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

begin to feel the underground rumble of the terrible civil war which
awaited Spain* It was for this reason that at Valencia I decided to
break the tour off, and as there was a Lloyd steamer at that moment at
Castellon de la Plana, in ballast on her homeward voyage, Herbert
chartered her and loaded everything for Hamburg, which we reached
the day before Christmas Eve, a Christmas tree ablaze with light on
our foremast. Our performing animals then travelled to London on a
British ship, and a winter season at the Agricultural Hall began.

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'BACK FROM its world tour.' This watchword, telling that Hagenbeck's
merry Noah's Ark was back from a journey through three continents
was the leitmotiv of our 193$ German tour. Ainywhere, anything
that has come from a remote clime is always prized most. Despite
all their art, one could not get very far with a turn put on by folk born
in the Neukoln suburb of Berlin and blessed with the good name of
Nilbock, but call them 'The Three Lorandos' and we had a turn which
enjoyed enormous success at the Cirque d'Hiver in Paris, at New
York's Madison Square Garden circus, and also at Britain's Blackpool
Tower. It was indeed one well worth seeing. (Here I may observe that
in most circuses in the world the language commonly spoken is
German, and German, moreover, with a distinct Berlin or Saxon
accent.)

The question which was now discussed at the latest conference of
the circus kings of the day was whether it should be Sarrasani or
Hagenbeck who got the contract at the Olympic Games in Berlin.
There was not much to choose between the two of us, but eventually
Berlin, and Sarrasani too, agreed that we should be the ones to get the
job, this solely on the grounds that we were the only enterprise
which, apart from the Australian continent, had played everywhere in
the world.

After the Far East tour, which was the crowning achievement of
his circus years, Richard Sawade had by now retired to his villa at
Lokstedt, a suburb of Hamburg, a house full of mementoes and valu-
able presents. Since the Spanish tour ended, my boy Herbert had
taken over the management of the circus. Erich, who had gone down
with a bad bout of typhoid while at Cairo, where we had been
obliged to leave him, was now back with his sea-lion group.

Now Herbert rang me up from Berlin. 'Father, you simply must
come to the first night,' he said in great excitement, 'there will be
crowds of people of the corps diplomatique, and Government repre-
sentatives galore have said they will come. The Prime Minister is going
to be there.'

Now, this latter personality was a gentleman I certainly wanted to

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ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

have a word with, for it was no secret that as Chief Verderer of the
German Reich he was also interested in the animal world, and it was
my hope that this interest was not limited to his 'aboriginal German
wild animals. ' The point is that we were urgently in need of a word of
support from him to our application for the diversion of Kaiser
Friedrich Road, which ran right through the middle of our Stellingen
zoo.

I put on tails and was just able to catch an aeroplane, and for the
first time in my life saw our big top from the air. I accompanied the
Prime Minister, who seemed most forthcoming, through the men-
agerie. This tour of inspection rather dragged out, and the Berlin folk
waiting in the circus tent otherwise folk, of course, so well known
for their restraint suddenly began chanting: 'Come on, Hermann,
we want to begin. ' At that time he was still known simply as Goring.
Later, however, when the bombs had begun to fall on Berlin, he
wanted to be known as Meier.

That programme which we offered the company of Olympiad
guests assembled that night in Berlin was one of the best in our whole
circus history. Alfred Kaden capped all previous big-cat shows with
his team of lions drawing a Roman chariot I A lion three-in-hand had
been a headline sensation of the New York press in 1890. Indeed, it
was with the tamer Deyerling's three lions in harness that my father
helped his new method of training by kindness to win through. And
now Kaden was an accomplishment for circus-lovers in Olympiad-
minded Berlin. Countless friends that evening greeted me and wished
us well. The Eleventh Olympic Games had assembled them from all
corners of the world, and they had not been at all surprised to find the
Carl Hagenbeck Circus in Berlin's Fehrbellin Square.

'Auf wiedersehen in 1940 in Tokyo!' our Japanese guests cried, and
the Japanese Ambassador, Hiroshi Oshima (who was later to pay us a
call at Stellingen), promised me he would smooth out any difficulties
for us. But neither he nor I then realised that three years later it was
to come to the second world war, which would put paid to all such
schemes of travel.

On November nth our circus band was once again playing its
signature tune 'Muss i denn . . .'* in Hamburg docks and the Hamburg-
Siid s.s. Vigo drew away from the transoceanic landing stage. It was
taking our artistes, musicians and office staff to Montevideo, while the

* The lovely South German folk song, which begins: 'So must I then away to the
town . . .'

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LOCUSTS HALT THE CIRCUS TRAIN

technical staff, the tamers, and all the animals and performing groups
were to be taken on board the s.s. Paraguay at Bremerhaven when our
Bremen run came to its close. The menagerie was to travel on the
General Osorio. As usual, I went on ahead, on the Cap Arcona, my second
voyage on this ship, which was now to take me to Uruguay.

We had reached the latitude of Cap Frio when I received a cable
to say that the Paraguay had sustained rudder damage and with wind
force nine to ten was drifting in the latitude of Cape Finisterre. That
cable certainly brought the perspiration to my forehead. I could only
too well imagine that small freighter battling, rudderless, in the raging
waters of the Bay of Biscay. Would the cables hold, would all our stuff
that was deck cargo not be swept overboard? And how was my boy
Herbert faring?

I at once got our ship's radio operator on the job. After four anxious
hours the answer came through: 'Rudder fixed, all well, serious
damage limited to Hold i , ' But just as I heaved a great sigh of relief
there was the radio officer, a regular Job that night, with a fresh
message. 'The Vigo, Herr Hagenbeck . . .*

I refused to accept it, and rushed up to see the captain, but he
could only shrug his shoulders and say that no more was known yet
than that the Vigo was twenty-four hours behind the Paraguay, hence
now in the heart of the storm, and there had been no response from
her for the last half-hour, while the Hapag s.s. his, which was about
thirty knots distant from her, had also been sending out an SOS, but
was now suddenly equally silent.

I was blind to the beauties of Rio Bay. At that very moment the
news vendors of Hamburg were already shouting: 'Hagenbeck Circus
goes down.' Then while so many families at home were racked with
anxiety and grief and the harbour authorities were being besieged
with questions there was our radio officer again at my door, this
time with very good news. It had been merely the his's radio which
had gone out of action, the ship had come safely through the storm.

Thereupon that radio officer and I treated ourselves to double
brandies and it occurred to me that our fellows on board the Paraguay
and the Vigo might have similar desires. So I cabled a fiver ahead,
cashable at the first chance of a pub crawl on land. Wireless thanks
were not tardy in coming through ! The Vigo crowd essayed madeira
at Funchal, the Paraguayans took their pleasure later on the sea front at
Copacabana.

By the time the first ship had reached Montevideo, the terrors of

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that storm were quite forgotten, but it only needed a glance down into
the deep holds of the ship to see what a pummelling that particular
ark had taken. The heavy lorry with our diesel equipment had broken
loose of its moorings and damaged the heating wagon and other
wagons on either side of it. The carnivores' cage-wagon had all but
been washed overboard indeed, it had only been saved at all thanks
to our brave fellows who constantly laboured, up to their waists in
water at times, fastening new hawsers.

Good old Lulu Gautier, our veteran haute icole rider, who accounted
himself a Swede, but had been born in a caravan which to judge by his
accent in German must have been stationed a jolly long time on the
River Spree, had given the ship up as lost and busied himself knocking
together a raft !

We erected our tent on the Playa Ramirez beach, a rather breezy
spot, but on the other hand one which was central. Besides, the con-
stant sea breeze tempered the tropical heat, for immediately beyond
the outer fence of our ground the deep swell of the Atlantic broke in
rollers over Montevideo's marvellous bathing beach.

This time we had prepared a special surprise for South America
our illuminated revue La Libellula Azul y with twenty-four girls in
phosphorescent costumes, the whole show a fantasy in light effects
and music, which Rewiiterich, as our master of ballet was always
called, had sold to me. I had the idea of offering the Argentine this
'Blue Libel* pantomime, for this was my third South American tour,
and I wanted to show something really novel.

As an integral part of the show the pantomime included our new
French aerial number. First, the Zemgannos showed the usual trapeze
work, then came their unique trick capping all else all at once out
went the lights, as if there had been a short circuit, and then one saw
them flying soundlessly through the air in their illuminated costumes.
That weightless flying and gliding through the air, emphasised by nerve-
tensing music, those illuminated saltos and pirouettes through com-
plete blackness, were like the flight of giant butterflies. The audience
held their breath, spellbound, and when the lights suddenly came on
again and they appeared in the ring below and bowed to the amphi-
theatre, those courageous artistes were granted thunderous applause.

One day, in the very heart of the performance, there was suddenly a
crazy rattle as it seemed of firearms somewhere just behind us,
and then, amid the din, the distinct sound of mortars. Erich was on at
the moment with his sea-lions, and the animals huddled in a heap and

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LOCUSTS HALT THE CIRCUS TRAIN

then rushed off, while the lions roared, the elephants trumpeted and
our wildly neighing horses tore at their chains. A zebra broke loose,
galloped to the high sea-wall and plunged over, to break its neck and
fall dead on the spot. And then we discovered that it was neither army
manoeuvres nor a sudden outbreak of a new revolution, but merely the
action of the kindly sun, mercilessly setting fire to all the elaborate
fireworks set up on the beach for the Montevideo in Flames show which
was to have been given on the beach that very evening.

It was a bad omen, but could anything really shake us, after Japan-
ese typhoons, Biscayan storms and Egyptian sandstorms? Well, here
at this wind-swept spot of Montevideo, I must confess that we found
that the much-feared South American tornadoes known as pamperos
could give us a worrying time, nor did they wait long about it. The
first broke a few days later, and at its peak reached a wind-speed
velocity of just on eighty miles an hour. On this occasion the whirl-
wind tore a biggish rent in the tent and then, just as we were expect-
ing the whole thing to be destroyed and were very worried, because
we had at that moment a full house it suddenly moved off out to sea.

The circus cleared at once. People poured out through every exit.
I had the canvas dropped and everything was furled and lashed, and
only just in time too, for in a few minutes a second whirlwind came
up. Like good seamen, our fellows sprang to the guy ropes of the
stabling. Fortunately, the rain, which was now pouring down in
torrents, made all the canvas many tons heavier than normally. There
was yet a third, but weaker, whirlwind, which did no more damage,
so that after all, by dint of speedy repair work, we were able to resume
performances the very next afternoon.

Box office results, however, were fated to fall off, for in the country
round Montevideo epidemics of smallpox and chickenpox had broken
out and entry to the city was suddenly prohibited. I at once decided
to curtail the run and go on to Buenos Aires, but a spate of press
reports alarmed the Argentine quarantine authorities and we were
refused an entry permit. While Herbert flew to Buenos Aires to see
what he could do about it, we made a further attempt to attract the
Montevideans. We put on our Libellula Azul show, but when the lights
went out there were at once furious cries of 'Put on those lights! 1

We thought we had thought of everything, but we had certainly not
thought of pickpockets, and they were apparently having the time of
their lives the moment that people's attention was attracted, and
dazzled, in the dark by the flashing lights above. After that we had the

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girls do their stuff under spotlights and only used the special light
effects for short bursts to heighten the effect. Then came Herbert's
telegram to say that we had our permit.

It was by night that our steamers crossed the Rio de la Plata the
River of Silver the tremendous quantities of soil in the waters of
which colour the Atlantic yellow for a considerable distance beyond
the mouth of the river. Where the La Plata current drives these water
masses out into the sea, the dorados swim about like mad things in
the surface water on the borderline between the salt and fresh
water.

On this visit to Buenos Aires, we erected the circus at the Retiro
station at Puerto Nuevo, and in the first three weeks counted an
audience total of one hundred thousand. For Herbert had had a very
good idea. He had invited no less than two thousand Argentinian
newspapers to the first nix show. They simply drank in the whole
programme on which they would not have been likely to spend their
own money and it was the best possible publicity, for without ex-
ception they praised us to the skies, indicating where we were on
any day and giving times of performances and prices on their own
initiative.

Those young journalists were also our great support in the battle
for success at La Plata, where we gave a gala performance to celebrate
the fiftieth anniversary of my father's first circus effort at the Heili-
gengeist Field in Hamburg. The programme of that first circus of
Father's which decided my life's career at the age of five and almost
certainly explains how it was that despite Father's prohibition I
myself later became a circus manager had always hung over the desk
in my office wagon. The porter brought in a card and told me that an
elderly lady wished to see me. The card read 'Senora Brown.' The
lady was a little embarrassed. The faint blush on her cheeks suited her
very well. But I was sure I was going to hear another of those heart-
melting stories of the favourite cat or dog, which generally begin
with the words : 'Mr. Hagenbeck, I must tell you about my Pfiffi, I am
so sure you will be thrilled . . .' and I had folded my hands in resigna-
tion when her glance fell on that framed programme.

'But there it is, hanging in your office,' she cried, with evident
delight. 'I had brought a copy of that very programme to show you 1
I am Dolinda de la Plata! 9

In great excitement she fumbled in her handbag and a moment later
smoothed out some yellowing papers on my desk. 'Mr. Hagenbeck,'

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she said, 'you were then only a tiny little rascal so high* and she
indicated the height of my writing desk. 'I can still see you as you
were in your little velvet suit, in the box. You must have been about
five, when my sister Rosita and I rode in your father 's show P

My heart rejoiced. I could not have wished myself a happier visit.
We sat talking a very long time, and I heard her life story, the final
and perhaps least exciting chapter of which was that of her marriage
to a wealthy husband.

'Would you believe it, 1 she said, 'my husband is really not at all
pleased that I have come to see you. But I am not going to run away
with the circus again today/ She laughed, and blushed again. But, she
said, she had not been able to stay quietly out at her villa at Belgrano
while we here in Buenos Aires were celebrating the great day when
she played in Carl Hagenbeck's first circus performance in Hamburg !

And so this festive occasion saw two worthy matrons, Dolinda and
Rosita, both in a box of honour, and I watched Dolinda's eyes grow
moist when she applauded the graceful pas-de-deux or the dizzy somer-
saults of our Italian riders.

After fifty years, Seiiora Brown and her sister once again had the
pleasure, in the jubilee reports of the Buenos Aires press, to read the
compliments which Hamburg critics had showered on them fifty
years before. 'Magnificent riders of volcanic temperament, whose
supreme art delighted the audience. Such grace, such daring leaps and
pirouettes. The audience expressed their warm admiration of the
"de la Plata" sisters.'

At La Plata, Germany meant three things : Hagenbeck, Zeppelin and
Cap Arcona. The luxury steamer Cap Arcona, proud flagship of the
Hamburg-Siid line, was the personification of German punctuality and
reliability. It was considered the thing in Argentinian 'society 1 to make
at least one voyage to Europe in her luxury cabins. One could truly
have set one's watch by her arrivals and departures.

When that year the Zeppelin Hindenburg with its roaring engines
cruised over Buenos Aires every ship's siren shrieked out its salute.
Even the newspapers fitted in, for it was the custom in Buenos Aires
for the big publishing houses to draw the attention of their readers to
any novelties. With southern enthusiasm, anybody who looked German
found himself embraced in the open street. And where did we stand?
One of the leading newspapers put it as follows in its headlines to an
article: 'Hagenbeck is Germany's best ambassador,' it said, and we
were proud of the praise.

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ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

From Buenos Aires we went by way of Rosario and Santa F6 to
Resistencia, on the southern frontier of Paraguay. What magnificent
landscapes those were ! Candelabra cacti sixteen feet high, pine woods,
eucalyptus woods. Wherever lakes gleamed there were myriads of
birds maguari storks, ibises, peewits and chayas, as the Argentinians
call those rare fighting cocks which have spurs even on their wings.
When our circus columns broke that paradisial natural peace, flocks of
enormous white and red flamingoes took wing.

Next we struck across the Gran Chaco, as far as the city of Salta,
where, on the edge of the primordial forest, no circus had ever been
before. Here the distances between one town and another were often
as great as the whole width of Germany from Konigsberg to Cologne.
Before we could reach Salta we found ourselves obliged to repeat our
Japanese technique, and strip the wheels from our wagons, to get
through the low-pitched tunnels, but the effort was worth it. In came
the gauchos in their brilliantly coloured ponchos, which are cloaks
consisting of a piece of cloth with a hole in the middle for the head to
go through. The landscapes here were cast with precise colour scales.
Picturesque mounted herdsmen, with their typical broad leather belts,
hung with jingling Bolivian silver pieces, rode in from a large radius
round. People came in with wagons from the slopes of the Cordilleras,
and there were settlers who drove from the very borders of Bolivia in
rattling carts on wheels higher than a man. The attendance was so
great that we could not cope with the masses. Paciencia! Mariana! At
least South American slackness was here to our advantage, for when we
told them they could not get in, without a murmur they spread out
their hide saddles and all night the camp-fires glowed in a ring all
round us. The men of the primeval forest bivouacked and waited.

Our name, however, proved an insuperable obstacle to the people,
in the majority of Indian origin. The Creoles made it Ahhenbeck,
while the pressmen pronounced it in English style and even spelled
it as they spoke H6genbeck. My nephew Fritz was a great collector
of mispronunciations of our name. He had assembled thirty- two differ-
ent world variants, the prize going to Hengleberth.

The greatest success in the Gran Chaco city was that of our sea-
lions. The Argentinian word for the sea-lion is lobos mannero. When
these animals balanced paraffin lamps on their noses and climbed
ladders with them, juggled with balls and in conclusion played on the
horn piano, our bronze-skinned Gran Chaco friends were beside
themselves with delight.

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Here our carnivore tamers had an exciting incident. During a per-
formance, two fully-grown maned lions attacked each other. Jonny
Schipfmann, the son of our old Russian traveller, threw himself
between them. But in a flash all the gauchos in the audience had drawn
their guns and surrounded the central cage, trigger-ready. Each was
out to be the hero and they were all poking their Colts through the
bars in preparation. Without delay, our folk intervened, for that
'assistance' was of far greater danger than the lions. There was real
danger of our gun-boys potting each other through the cage while
Schipfmann drove the lions back into the tunnel leading to the ring.
We had the impression that our marksmen visitors were rather dis-
appointed as they tucked their guns back into their holsters.

This South American tour of ours was marked throughout by a
struggle against the elements. In Mendoza, city of vineyards and
churches, an earthquake brought the whole population out of doors in
their night attire. The festooned lights over our circus danced as if we
were on the high seas. At Rufino on the Pacific Railway we ran into a
sandstorm which lasted six hours, while at Venado Tuerto we were
nearly drowned by rain and mud. For months not a drop of water had
fallen and this had prompted us to risk erecting the circus on a sun-
baked field which lay in a hollow. Then, all at once, the heavens opened
their sluices, and in a few hours the water was a foot deep over the
whole ground, and the streets of the town were torrential brooks
pouring more water still down on us. We had no option but to return
all the gate money and pull out as quickly as ever we could. Dis-
mantling our circus generally took us six hours, but on this occasion
we needed forty-eight hours. Our tent men and tractor drivers fought
day and night against the torrential rain which continually poured
down, costing us a round thirty thousand pesos.

A new surprise was occasioned us by our journey to Cordoba. On
the way the skies suddenly darkened. The next instant it was not hail-
stones which clattered down against window-panes and roofing but-
locusts, locusts in their billions. A cloud of them about fifty miles long
and fifteen miles broad was blacking out the sun. Wherever they came
down, the crops were destroyed. Our train slowed down, then sud-
denly stopped altogether. The locomotive had plunged a foot deep
into a churned-up mass of insects, till it could not move at all. The
wheels skidded helplessly in the squelchy mess.

The driver, fireman and guards tied handkerchiefs across their
mouths, strapped sleeves and trouser legs tight round wrists and

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ankles, and laboured to shovel the track clear. The fireman shovelled
red-hot ashes on to the rails, and with much hissing and puffing the
locomotive slowly forged its way through the buzzing swarms of
migrating locusts.

The only creatures which got any pleasure out of that chance
meeting were our monkeys. In their hundreds the insects poured in
through the ventilators of the monkeys' box- wagons, to be gobbled
down by the handful. The following morning the animals were still
sleeping it off, snug in their straw, their bellies rotund and their
pouches still crammed full of the insects. It certainly was a party for
them.

After a three-thousand-mile tour through the Argentine, we at last
erected our circus at Buenos Aires. In the Chaco, near Resistencia, we
had shot jacars, or alligators, on the La Germania ranch we had
lassoed agile nandus, eaten asado grilled au brocket and drunk fragrant
foaming mat through silver tubes from ornate gourds.

Cosida, then the most celebrated bandit leader under the Southern
Cross, was our 'guest* here. Throughout the country, the police
were looking for him and his men, when there he was, in a red car,
driving up to our box office. We of course had no idea who it was,
while those who did were dumb from sheer terror. To our men he
was just a rich ranch owner. I was not present, but it seems that
Cosida and his men made a long chain which slowly backed towards
the office ticket shutter, none of the Argentinians daring to give the
alarm from fear of being turned into a sieve by bullets.

Cosida reached his goal: * Fifty front seats, please.'

'Sorry, sold out,' said the man on duty.

'Then fifty box seats. '

'There are only six boxes left, sir, that makes forty-eight seats, but
I will have two more chairs brought into one of them for you. '

l Mvy bien, here are twenty pesos for your kindness. I also want five
gallery seats, anywhere in the circus.'

He put down the money and turned to give away the fifty box
seats to the poorest 'fence- viewers,' while he himself and four of his
bodyguard dissolved somewhere among the five thousand members
of tie audience. Though his description was published in the whole
press, not a man betrayed him, and I only learned that he had been
there at all after his red car had long vanished from the scene.

One of my great delights was a fan mail of no less than seven
hundred letters which came in after I gave a talk on the Argentine

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radio system. They were from the remotest corners of the Gran
Chaco, from the Matto Grosso region of Brazil, from the most out-
of-the-way settlements where only Germans had established them-
selves. The 'German Hour* of Buenos Aires radio was often largely
occupied by Hagenbeck's, our tamers and performers giving inter-
views and many items of our programme being described. From the
mail I received I saw that there were many of our blood who had
travelled distances which took days to be able to hear those pro-
grammes which brought them a touch of the homeland. One letter
read: 'I really ought to be rather angry with you, for during the
running commentary on the circus my wife let the dinner get burnt
to a frazzle.*

209
-AML

'MEN, ANIMALS, SENSATIONS'

WHILE THE circus was completing its Argentinian tour, I had taken the
Cap Arcona back to Germany. At Stellingen the zoo-geographical re-
arrangement of our animal park was nearing completion. A large
party of zoo directors and other guests of honour from various coun-
tries of Europe had been invited to the inauguration of the large cage-
less sections for elephants and rhinos. With those installations, which
completed the new 'Asia* division of the park, Stellingen had com-
pletely changed its appearance, particularly as my brother Heinrich
had finally succeeded in getting the Kaiser Friedrich Road diverted, so
that it no longer cut through our grounds.

An army of navvies, powerfully backed by our Indian and African
working elephants, had accomplished all the constructional work.
Where previously the trams had clattered through the park there were
now broad lawns, flower-beds and shrubberies, and near the main
entrance the giant bears of the Alaskan island of Kodiak now greeting
people when they came in. Their ingeniously planned free compound,
visible on either side, became our shop window.

While our tented circus was still touring the Argentine, groups of
performing lions and tigers, African and Indian elephants, sea-lions
and various artistes went from Stellingen to Berlin's Deutschland
Hall. We wanted a striking general title for the show. What was it to
be? We racked our brains. Should we take the title of Father's book
Beasts and Men! Far too modest. Then, perhaps, Men, Beasts and
Attractions! * Sensation!' cried my nephew Fritz, and we had it. In no
time the brushes of the decorators were at work Men, Animals,
Sensations was the name for the Deutschland Hall programme, and it
rang the bell too.

From the circus performer's standpoint Berliners are the most
critical but also the most open-hearted folk in Germany. Their
repartee can kill stone dead, or it can be a springboard to greater fame.
For this reason the management of the Deutschland Hall engaged only
what was best in ring and stage work. Hence, to have had an engage-
ment there was equivalent as recommendation in the trade to having
played in New York's Madison Square Garden or London's Olympia.

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'MEN, ANIMALS, SENSATIONS'

One of the items of the Hagenbeck programme this year was a
plucky American girl who climbed to the dizzy height of a seventy-
two-foot ladder and dived into a diminutive water-tank only ten feet
in diameter. This brave young artiste had toured the world with that
sensational diving act, in which a few inches made all the difference
between life and death.

Her fame at Berlin was only topped by that of Koringa, a twenty-
one-year-old tousle-headed girl who did an Indian fakir turn in which
she also carried through breath-taking experiments in hypnosis and
catalepsy with crocodiles and giant snakes. Barefoot, she climbed a
ladder, the rungs of which consisted of razor-sharp sabres, and she
came unscathed through terrifying medieval tortures. Her large
black eyes seemed to attract not only animals but also men. She was
certainly a captivating figure in the circus world.

The following year we again sent a large contingent of exotic
animals to the capital. The Deutschland Hall was then transformed
into an African jungle scene for a revue called Ki-sua-heli. It was an
enchanting sight to see our two hundred flamingoes rise with out-
stretched wings in a blush-pink cloud towards the spotlights. The
trick was eminently uncomplicated. Before the show the birds were
kept in a darkened room. When released they took the gleaming rays
of the lights for the rising sunshine, in which, every morning, in
their Stellingen Park home, they stretched their wings.

However, the real sensation, not only for myself but for other
people, in that year's Deutschland Hall programme the last show of
peacetime was the first indoor flight in the world. Today helicopters
are the maids-of-all-work of the air, but at that time the suggestion
of an aircraft flying inside a hall was unheard-of folly. A year before
this, Professor Heinrich, test pilot of the Focke Works, had at Bremen
attained international records for Germany with this discovery. At a
time when no other movable-wing aircraft in the world had got be-
yond the testing ground, Hanna Reitsch was the first woman to fly a
helicopter from Bremen to Berlin.

'Caution, caution 1* the loudspeakers cried. 'Will members of the
public kindly take care to hold their hats and their programmes
firmly. The suction of the rotors is so powerful that loose objects
might be sucked up and endanger the aircraft. '

The three-armed horizontal blades then began to turn and the cabin
suspended below them slowly rose from the floor till it was close to
the ceiling. Then the front propeller came into action, and like a

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ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

giant moth the machine roared round and round the large hall. All at
once it was motionless above our heads! An aircraft which could
stand still in the air ! But that was impossible ! But there above us was
that young hussy Hanna looking down, grinning at the fifteen thousand
astonished faces gaping up at her. And then, after another round of the
hall, she came down again on to her three wheeled feet. Bravo 1
Bravo ! The deafening applause was for her and the Bremen professor.

One September day of 1938, when all Germany, in a state of
anxiety, was awaiting the results of the Munich conference, our circus,
back from South America, was playing at Wanne-Eickel in the Ruhr
to almost empty seats. War ! That menacing word was hovering in the
air. In the dwelling wagons of the circus artistes from other coun-
tries and our Czechoslovak tent workers clustered round their
radio sets, to catch any news from home. All around were anti-
aircraft guns, searchlights and listening appliances, already in position.
It was the menacing stillness which precedes a storm.

When, late in the afternoon, the results of the conference were
broadcast, and it appeared that Chamberlain, Mussolini, Hitler and
Daladier had once again prevented the outbreak of a second world war,
a wave of joyous relief ran through Germany. Orders to withdraw
were almost immediately given to all military units. But there were
not sufficient tractors to remove all the guns and other equipment at
once from the positions they had taken up, and the Wanne-Eickel
batteries were actually manhandled away by the men in uniform, for
them to be able to visit our show that same evening. They were, I
confess, stoutly supported in this effort by our working elephants,
who to accommodate the customer put their best into it.

Our last peacetime tour wound up with our show at the Bremen
fair. Then came our traditional 'works banquet* at Stellingen, when
once a year all who worked in the circus, in whatever capacity,
joined in a festive evening. The favourite dancing partner that evening
was a senorita from Mexico, who was also our only feminine animal
catcher. This was the first occasion on which we could admire lovely
Erika Cook. Since, in 1864, Lorenzo Casanova founded the line of our
animal catchers and world travellers, we had had no less than forty-
eight men who year in, year out caught for us from the North Pole to
the South.

By 1913, we could count fully sixty species of mammal which we

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'MEN, ANIMALS, SENSATIONS'

had been pioneers in supplying alive, and the number was further in-
creased when our official zoologists, such as Dr. Sokolowsky, Dr.
Knottnerus-Meyer, Professor Dr. de Beaux and last, but not least, the
present director of the Miinster Zoo, Ludwig Zukowsky, took up this
work. In 1937 we succeeded, again as pioneers, in bringing sea-
leopards (the Ogmorhinus leptonyx Blainville) to Stellingen. Many of
those animals, brought to Europe alive for the first time by the firm
of Carl Hagenbeck of Hamburg, have become known scientifically by
the distinguishing label Hagenbecki.

Though Seiiorita Erika Cook had played no part in all this work,
just before the war she supplied us a number of times with flamingoes,
monitors and rattlesnakes from the peninsula of Yucatan. On this par-
ticular occasion she had brought her contingent with her. When our
man took his lorry down to the harbour to pick them up, rather ex-
pecting to find a mutton-fisted mannish sort of woman, all he could
see on the ship's rail was a graceful young creature whom he would
have taken for a French frock model.

'Are you Mrs. Cook?' he asked.

'Si, si,' shj nodded down to him, her enormous ear-rings dangling
out from under the sombrero.

There was a sudden transformation of the most cross-grained of our
animal keepers. They all became most charming caballeros. But just
as mysteriously as she appeared, the lovely Erika vanished, parting
suddenly from us again for ever, in search of new adventures. She
held her air pilot's papers, of course drove a car, she carried a gun
and she caught dangerous snakes. At the party that year she carried
off the first prize. But that was partly because I made all the crack
shots promise to leave her an easy victory!

When after the Polish campaign the centre of gravity of the war
switched to the Western Front, the painters got busy on every Ger-
man circus, turning it dark green, for the war in the air made it
essential to camouflage the bright canvas tops. Out went the sparkling
festoons of lights, and circuses had to institute their air-raid squads,
among whose duties it was to see that all tent-rope stanchions were
capped with white, and the way to the nearest shelter or trench was
clearly indicated. Steel helmets, gas masks and first-aid sets had to be
at hand. Petrol and oil went on ration.

Our pony teams were now used to go to the post office and the

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ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

slaughter-house. Instead of juicy quarters of meat for the carnivores,
they got only offal. Sugar, bread, groundnuts, bananas and oranges
vanished from the animals' menus. The most important document we
received every month was the food permit from the Hamburg
authorities, one for men, and one for animals. As the months dragged
by, our ranks became thinner. More and more age groups were called
to the Army. Fully a thousand favourite circus sites in North- West
Germany had to be closed to us as a precaution. All Germany's
circuses now crowded into Central, Southern and Eastern Germany.

We took up our winter quarters in our Viennese circus building.
Then in 1940 we set out on a tour, going north as far as Dessau, and
ending up in Danzig, which was still not blacked out. This was my
second son, Herbert's, last tour. The following year, he fell seriously
ill and died.

From India too came sad news. Uncle John, seventy-four years of
age, had died in a British internment camp. Since 1938 Erich, my
youngest, had been working in America, in charge of our office there.
When the war had ruined the international trade in animals, he
travelled for a year as sea-lion trainer in the Ringling Bros., Barnum
and Bailey show, which was friendlily disposed towards us, and while
with this at the Sarasota headquarters he equipped their zoo with a
rock home for the monkeys and a swimming pool for the hippo-
potamus he had originally wanted to be an architect. But in April
1942 came his internment in the United States. When frightful air
attacks were threatening to destroy the life work of three generations
of Hagenbecks, he was behind barbed wire at Fort Tennessee in
North Dakota.

On January ijth, 1 943 , fifteen thousand people had filled Berlin's
Deutschland Hall. For the eighth time people were pouring in to the
great Men, Animals, Sensations circus show, which had become almost
a national event. Then suddenly the air-raid sirens shrilled. Enemy
bombers were again attacking Germany's capital.

In exemplary calm and self-possession, the massed audience filed
out of the enormous hall. Only a very few persons were slightly hurt
as the first incendiaries were setting the roof on fire. While the
audience were pouring out, the circus's artistes, men and women of
all nationalities, unseen by the general public, were already feverishly
at work in the stables and storerooms, endeavouring to save costumes,
equipment and above all else the animals from the blazing hall.

Undisturbed by the thunder of the anti-aircraft guns, the tremendous

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'MEN, ANIMALS, SENSATIONS'

detonations of the falling bombs, and the crashes as the roof girders
came tumbling down, our elephants heaved the ponderous carnivores'
cage-wagons outside, where die track-laying tractors could take them
over. Then those magnificent animals followed their keeper, to await
the end of the attack in nearby Grunewald wood. So long as animals
are not wounded or terrified by fire, they are always absolutely calm,
for, as far as their minds can tell, there is no difference between an
air attack and a bad tropical storm.

BOMBS ON ANIMAL PARADISE

WE TOOK the bombing of the Deutschland Hall as a grim warning, and
at Stellingen instituted all the anti-air-raid preparations we could
think of. But the catastrophic assault which was visited on Hamburg
only a few months later exceeded anything in the way of bombing
that had previously been humanly conceivable. In the heart of the
park, Heinrich had a staff air-raid shelter constructed. The lakes seemed
to offer an ample supply of water against incendiaries. Besides, the
animal park was not in the central area of a city, or near a railway
station, as the Berlin Zoo was ; it was well out in the green belt on the
outskirts.

Although most of our staff who were fit for military service had
been taken into the forces, we were nevertheless still able to keep our
gates open. Our handful of keepers were assisted by a number of
prisoners of war, French, Czech, Dutch and Polish. As all the men
enjoyed the same conditions as our own, and the work in the animal
park was not arduous or at all monotonous, every one of them did his
best not to lose the job, and worked well. Besides, an old soldier him-
self, Heinrich knew what it meant to be treated decently by those
above you. All this conduced to these men sticking to us with great
loyalty in the hour of greatest danger, and when it came to Very lights
burning bright over Hamburg and the bluish-white fingers of the
searchlights trying to trace the bombers manoeuvring high above us
every night, our own men and our P.O. W.s alike were all to be found
at their posts scattered about the park.

One day our defences shot down a long-distance enemy recon-
naissance aircraft over the north-western outskirts of the town. One
of the Canadian airmen who baled out of this came down plumb over
our bear pit there to be caught in the branches of a tree and hang
dangling a few feet above the animals.

* Where on earth have I come down? 1 he asked when rescued, pale
with strain, and holding out a packet of cigarettes as offering to our
men.

'In the bear pit of Hagenbeck's Animal Park,' they told him.

'Next time I'll come in the right way, on a proper ticket,' said the

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BOMBS ON ANIMAL PARADISE

airman, with typical Canadian humour and a sigh of relief that the
proper inmates of his strange refuge had been locked up at the
time.

TTien came the night of July 2$th, 1943, the catastrophe which
has gone down in history as the 'Great Fire of Hamburg* for the
earlier castrophe of 1 842 was certainly dimmed by the modern total
destruction of a city of over a million inhabitants by a hail of in-
flammable phosphorus bombs. The clock showed about half an hour
after midnight when the first point of the attack reached the city.

'There have never been so many before,' people whispered, crouch-
ing in cellars, deep shelters and trenches. But still the din of the
engines overhead increased, till one's ear could no longer distinguish
how many squadrons were involved. Separate craft could no longer
be heard, nothing but the united drone of a continuous stream of roaring
engines. The lurid glow of innumerable flares bathed walls, trees and
the rock-mountains of our park in a ghostly light. And then hell broke
loose.

What took place that night, when three hundred thousand dwelling
houses were totally or partially destroyed and no less than forty
thousand men, women and children were torn to pieces by bombs,
crushed by falling walls or caught in flight, to be bogged down in
boiling asphalt and burned to death, can only be pictured by a man
who went through that inferno of a city of a million in flames. Taken
completely by surprise by the weight of the attack, I took refuge
together with my wife and household staff in the basement of our
Lokstedt house where the central-heating boiler was situated. Then a
heavy land-mine tore a huge crater in the grounds, and the blast
destroyed the house above us, together with all my objets fait and
mementoes. Fortunately, we were all fully dressed and were able to
get out of the ruins.

A zebra and a wounded wild horse came galloping by. I could well
imagine that there was hell let loose at Stellihgen. The sky above us
was as bright as day. About half-way through that bombing, which
lasted a round hour and a half, a tornado of fire broke out, against
which one could make little headway. The air was saturated with the
acrid stench of the burning city. A hail of incendiaries came down on
the park grounds. At the same time, down came thousand-pounders,
tearing sixteen deep craters between the outer wall and the animal
houses. Four block-busters one after the other then brought all
buildings down in ruins.

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ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

The worst part of it, however, was the fire, which was now quite
beyond control. When the first incendiaries came down on the roof
of the elephant house and this burst into flames, our resourceful chief
keeper, Fritz Theisinger, quickly loosed his fourteen elephants, which
he had kept tethered by only one hind leg, and led them outside. There
they could try to avoid the incendiaries which were falling every-
where, and they took refuge in the large pool. Next, aided by the
Czech P.O.W.s, he made an attempt to save the house, but at this
point the P.O.W.s lost their nerve and ran away.

From the large main restaurant which was already burning
incidentally it contained one of Germany's largest collections of
antlers and similar trophies six waiters and keepers made good their
escape, and made for the cellars of the summer restaurant, which
was still untouched, but before they reached the lion pit a bomb
destroyed them.

At the main building, Heinrich and his boy, Carl Heinrich, who
happened to be home on leave, were making efforts together with
keepers and some neighbours to get the carnivores' cage- wagon out
into the open. This they succeeded in doing, but, alas, those poor
animals were doomed, being burnt to death the very next night in the
Hamburg goods station marshalling yard we were trying to get
them away to our Vienna circus quarters.

At one blow H.E.s had now disrupted the water supply system, and
our own mobile pumping plant was also out of action. The fire spread
at increasing speed. In the light of the flames, I remember noticing
that the blast had actually bent in the grill of the carnivores' cage.
Everything was now ablaze, all our transport boxes had gone, all our
store of timber, we had not even so much as a besom broom left;
even the materials which we had taken care to assemble for eventual
repairs were flaming to high heaven.

The heat became unbearable. Animals were crouching in terror in
the corners of their cages. It was now clearly impossible to save them,
and so, to save them from a horrible death by burning, Heinrich and
Carl Heinrich steeled their hearts and decided to shoot them, and
thus at our own hands lovely Siberian tigers, black panthers, jaguars,
pumas, bears, hyenas and wolves, and all our lion pit, creatures we
had assembled through long years and treated with much love, had
to perish, an animal-lover's agony as the shots rang out, destroying
stock it would take tens of years to build up again. That night four
hundred and fifty valuable animals lost their lives. Somehow, two

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BOMBS ON ANIMAL PARADISE

tigers escaped from their cage. These Carl Heinrich found later, be-
neath the ripped-up floor, where they had crept to be out of the way
of the flames. But they too had to be shot, for we had absolutely
nowhere to keep them.

Incredible efforts were made in those dark hours. I saw brave
keepers staggering with heavy giant tortoises, weighing up to three
hundredweight, out of the terrarium. The tortoises' shells were
already so hot that the men could only handle them after wrapping
wet blankets over them. The terrible heat shattered the glass of the
aquaria and terraria. The snakes slithered away into freedom in the
night. A miniature hippopotamus and an alligator also slipped away,
to hide in the Japanese Island pond. The alligator, indeed, lived a
glorious free life for some weeks.

Most of the staff housing accommodation was destroyed. Heinrich's
villa, which escaped, was then filled with palliasses and camp beds,
to become the first emergency home for everybody, the women
cooking over open fires in the garden. The first day, there was
African wart-hog to eat, and the company which sat round the table
on that occasion still talk about that novel roast with great en-
thusiasm.

It is, however, a wild exaggeration to say, as some do, that lions,
elephants and rhinos broke loose that night and brought new terror
to the ruined streets of Hamburg. Such yarns, so bright in fantasy,
do not correspond to the truth. Though most of our walls were down
and many animals certainly could have got out, in fact they did not.
On the contrary, those which were at liberty clung to the snug area
which was familiar to them. There was the case of our last wild horse,
which had an eye put out by a bomb splinter and galloped frantically
away. But even this was later found close to its ruined home, peace-
fully cropping the grass, together with the zebras. There was also a
distracted chimpanzee which knocked at the balcony door of a house
in Stellingen, but that was soon fetched back by veteran Beckmann,
who was in charge of our fodder supplies. Poor old Beckmann arrived
in a muck sweat with the chimp in his arms, having had quite an
exacting walk back, because every few minutes he had to stop and set
the chimp down, to dance a jig with him or indulge in other antics,
just to keep the big anthropoid ape in placid humour. It would of
course have been quite beyond Beckmann's strength to have persuaded
the powerful beast to go with him if it did not want to and it did

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ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

only want to for short spells, while the fun of the preceding game was
still occupying its mind.

Our Japanese sea-eagle, Jonny, who also escaped, was to be seen
the following day, wheeling round and round over the park. For Jonny
was used to his regular Stellingen meals, and when feeding- time came
round let himself be taken without the slightest difficulty. The only
animals which were rather a nuisance were some impudent baboons,
which for weeks scared the good ladies of Stellingen, lying in wait
for them as they went home from shopping, stealing their goods and
making off again. When one woman's husband leapt to her rescue,
the monkey seized the stick he was flourishing and in its rage bit it
in small pieces with its powerful teeth. And as those dangerous
beasts could find sufficient basic food for themselves in the gardens
all round, and avoided all traps with great cunning, we were finally
obliged to shoot them one by one.

The total bill of destruction of the Stellingen Animal Park that
night was : the main building, both restaurants, the guest house, the
reception office, the aquarium and terrarium, the cattle compound
stables, the large monkey rock enclosure and both farmyards. Many
other buildings were severely damaged. The water supply and the
seals' quarters were destroyed. Our stone reproductions of primeval
monsters were pocked all over by flying bomb fragments.

At the same time, in this one night, we lost all our circus winter
quarters, together with stabling, repair shops, training rings and a
great wealth of costumes, harness and other equipment. One com-
plete big top, three transportable sets of seating and eighty circus
wagons went up in flames, including here valuable dwelling wagons
and well-fitted mobile workshops, lighting plant, caterpillar tractors
and lorries. Three groups of performing lions and tigers and an in-
valuable outfit of horses were also killed by the bombs.

By night the burnt-out animal park now glowed ghostly with the
unspent phosphorus which was spattered everywhere. Scratching his
back against a tree plastered with this chemical, a battle material
difficult to get rid of, our rhinoceros seriously damaged his thick
carapace. Everywhere cinders were still smouldering. Amid charred
timbers and twisted girders lay the distended bodies of dead animals.
Heartbroken, Heinrich took his leather-bound copy of the first
edition of Father's biography and in it wrote : 'An d all this was destroyed
in ninety minutes. 9

Nevertheless, we were not going to be beaten. Heinrich went to

22o

BOMBS ON ANIMAL PARADISE

Stellingen at once, to start the work of rebuilding with working
elephants and pony teams. He built temporary quarters for our
bombed-out keepers and took the whole office management into his
own villa. I made a temporary home in a converted stable.

The war was still not over. There might be fresh bombing any
night. However, it was clear that as soon as the clouds of smoke over
Hamburg let them have sight of the ruins the reconnaissance planes
realised that here any further action would be merely throwing bombs
on a dead town, for the one-time inhabitants of which mechanical
excavators were digging mass graves at the Ohlsdorf Cemetery.

One of the many who met his death that night in his Stellingen home
was Walter Ebert, our senior animal catcher. Adrian Jacobsen,
Hagenbeck's Norwegian ship's captain and 'man catcher, 1 lost all he
had. By Lufthansa aeroplane he now travelled back to his native island
of Riso, one hundred and fifty miles beyond the Arctic Circle, and
there that most meritorious traveller and explorer died. Today the
man who in 1878 brought the first Eskimos to Germany lies at rest,
beside his German wife, in the Stellingen graveyard. The Hamburg
Folklore Museum houses the treasures which he collected during his
adventurous journeys from the Arctic to the Antarctic.

At this time only our Vienna circus building brought in any satis-
factory revenue, but as here too most of the men were in the forces
the circus programme consisted almost entirely of female performers.
There were Evelyn de Cook with her performing panthers, and Gloria
Lilienborn's accordion girls. The youngest girl of all riding in the red
ring was Lulu Gautier's twelve-year-old daughter Ingeborg. But apart
from the famous Danish film comedians Pat and Patachon our Lilli-
putian gentry had also been drawn into the Heroes' Maw, as people
began to call the remarkably keen Recruiting Commission in those
days.

We played almost exclusively to men on leave, soldiers en route to
new postings, conscripted workers and the inmates of Vienna's many
military hospitals. It was a moving sight when legless and armless
men young, most of them some minus any limbs at all, were
helped or carried into the circus, there to spend a couple of hours
trying to forget what they had lost. When that gruesome train of men
left the circus again, in the dismal blue light of the black-out lighting,
the air force radio alarm signal would already be emitting its harsh
tick-tack-tick-tack. What the Viennese had thought would never

221

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

happen now descended on the carefree home of the waltz. The air-
raid sirens drove us down into the deep shelters.

One morning when we emerged again from the Stephensdom cata-
combs to return to the circus, our cook's parrot Aunt Emmie we
called it was missing. The bird had been blown by the blast of a
bomb into a barrel which fortunately was not filled with water, but
could not get out. Suddenly from the depths of the tub came a harsh,
hollow voice : 'This is what life is really like, this is what life is really
like, this is what life is really like every day !'

Not an eye in the room was dry. Aunt Emmie was one of the most
gifted talking parrots of the grey breed that I have ever known. They
had had to give up taking her into the shelter with them because she
would keep mimicking the beastly whine of falling bombs, and did it
too well.

222

ELEPHANT PROTEST AT MALMO

THERE WAS a telegram from Malmo. A Swedish circus manager wanted
to hire some trained groups of performing animals. I at once made an
offer. Let me admit at once that quite a number of my closest col-
laborators strongly advised me against it. But I did not share their
views. Had I not first gone to Sweden during the first world war and
taken our show there without any opposition? If the applicant could
provide the entry permit for our performing groups, everything was
in order. After all, the hiring of circus animals had always been our
job.

Telegrams flew to and fro. Visas, certificates and forms were duly
obtained, and finally our tamers and keepers set out, together with
their elephants, tigers, sea-lions, horses and exotic animals, travelling
via Stettin on the ferry steamer Deutschland through the narrow mine-
free channel which led out to the free world. They had escaped the
bombs just before, on November 4th, 1944, our last refuge, the
Vienna building, went up in flames.

In May this year, Heinrich, still at Stellingen, had celebrated his
golden wedding. According to our custom, all family celebrations and
jubilees were held together with our collaborators. Now that our
guest house was in ruins, Heinrich had a huge copper of good goulash
made at home, the elephant house was specially cleaned out, and
pony wagons transported the copper there. Heinrich also managed to
get hold of a supply of real beer, and this was set out on the long
trestle table which had been erected down the broad gangway facing
the elephants.

Recently, I came upon a photograph of that scene. The serious,
drawn faces are evidence enough of the trials and privations of that
year. Both men and animals had had hard enough labour clearing
away the ruins. My thoughts go above all to the elephants, reduced to a
diet of nothing but mangolds and straw. The constant agitation, the
alarms and all the depressing responsibility of those terrible days took
too great a toll of my brother. Heinrich was already seventy. Three
months before the unconditional surrender of Germany he was
exhausted, and died.

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ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

This left me alone. Carlo was in Sweden, Carl Heinrich somewhere
in the Army, Erich in American internment. But at last there was
news of him. Shortly before the end of the war, the interned civilian
Germans were exchanged, and he travelled home on the Swedish
s.s. Gripsholm. After seven long years of separation, I at last saw my
youngest one again.

1945, and Capitulation! Good fortune and the eleventh-hour dis-
cernment of the man then at the head of Hamburg spared us a final
battle for any would-be * Fortress of Hamburg/ Under that sort of
slogan, so sadly belied by all the facts, pointlessly, in those last days
of the war, the fanatics sacrificed many an open German city and all its
inhabitants. At Hamburg we were spared that. At last, by what
bridges were still standing over the Elbe, in poured British armoured
vehicles, and when the first of these reached the corner of our grounds
we knew that the war was over. The first Britishers to stream into the
park were souvenir collectors and live mascot hunters. But when in
her fluent English my white-haired sister-in-law explained that, alas,
we had no baby bears, no desert foxes, nor even any living eagles to
offer them, they went their way.

I found tragi-comedy in the following incident. I had retired with
a book to the private corner of our animal park when three Tommies
appeared on the scene, anxious to snap themselves as a souvenir.
Suddenly they spotted me in my deck-chair. The leading lad gave a
peremptory little nod, to tell me to take the camera and release the
shutter for them. Then he gave a little whistle, to call me over, and
next, pointing to the shutter, a still more peremptory nod. So I
lowered my book to my knee, shook my head disapprovingly, and in a
lovely Cockney which would have delighted the heart of Reuben
Carstang I cried: 'Wot a bloody shime, tiking a poah deaf and dumb
b into the ruddy Army ! '

The response was astonishing. All three Tommies blushed to the
tips of their ears, begged my pardon, and came quite penitently up
to me, and when they tumbled to who I was they would not be satis-
fied till I had my photo taken with them, each in turn releasing the
shutter.

Carl Heinrich narrowly but successfully avoided being taken
prisoner of war. A Holstein farmer lent him a suit of clothes, and by
devious routes he made his way home as quickly as he could. As his
father was gone, he now had to take on his share in the business. Thus
Heinrich's son and I together set about rebuilding all we had lost.

224

The end of the Berlin Deutschland Hall. Without any panic, an audience

of fifteen thousand persons followed each other outside, while the men

hauled out the mobile cages with lions and tigers

Left: A lady giraffe haughtily steps out of her well -cushioned special
coach

Right: Richard Sawade's pet tiger surprises a noisy party in a deck
cabin during one of our voyages

ELEPHANT PROTEST AT MALMO

It was I think only now that to the full we grasped all the extent of
our losses. For we had also lost the animals which we had evacuated
to East and Central German zoos, partly during the war, but also
partly after it as victims of the occupation forces. When we came to
bring back our animals from Vienna we were unable to load even as
few as twenty circus wagons and lorries. In the overpowering aerial
bombardment of that grand baroque city, Dresden, the Sarrasani
building had been one of those which went up in flames. With it went
the baggage wagons which we had stored there, and they were full of
equipment, uniforms, costumes, harness. And though at least our very
lovely twenty-one white Berber stallions survived the war, not one of
them ever reached Hamburg.

I now placed great hopes in the speedy return of the performing
groups which were on hire, touring Sweden, for my plan was from
them and what circus equipment I had left two tents, a set of seating
and a few wagons to reassemble a circus at home in Hamburg.

But this was not to be. One Saturday morning, in the very first days
after the capitulation, a jeep appeared and in the jeep was a young
British officer, whose regiment had discovered a small wandering
German circus somewhere on Liineburg Heath. This the British had
instructed to entertain their troops. But it was a very small circus,
and lacked a great deal. But it so happened that one member of this
family show had a very exact knowledge of what we possessed. So
here the British forces were they had come to requisition our big
top.

'Take whatever you think may come in useful/ I heard that British
officer tell his protege, and the worthy manager of the paltry little
circus did not wait to be told twice.

Of course, I protested as energetically as I could against this seizure.
In vain. Into our warehouse poured these other circus folk. They
knew very well what they wanted. At once they set about loading
the heavy rolls of tenting. And now, they said, all they required were
masts, seating and the baggage wagons which went with it all. Yes,
and was there not an electricity-generating plant? Even that British
officer had not guessed all that a circus might need, but as it was but a
simple question of requisitioning and packing, they thought they
would also take another tent, as spare. Now the Britisher perceived
that at least they owed me a requisition document. While this was
being made out, I expressed my doubts as to whether this keen
colleague of the circus world who was taking the stuff would be able

225

15AML

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

to erect that very big big top without expert workers, so I contrived
to secure agreement that my own foreman and some of my men
should be appointed to go with our material.

Impudence certainly conquered! The robbing circus actually set
itself up preening with our plumage on the ground at Hamburg's
Dammtor station, using both our tents, one beside the other. We
could perhaps be thankful that they had not required us to empty our
menagerie too to provide them with the trump card of a really good
animal show. It was not till much later, when the British had estab-
lished their military government at Hamburg, that I was able to find a
lawyer to enter a claim against the requisitioning and in the end
secured the return of all our equipment.

Now, I doubt if there is any enterprise all the equipment of which
is marked with the firm's name, so that circus manager and our head
man now came to loggerheads, each indicating quantities of cable,

Stlights and similar equipment as their own. The British adopted
decision that each party should take one-half. But in those days a
lo$t bulb was to be replaced only on the black market, if at all the
Silver Hamburg street lamps were protected against pilfering by
Mibed wire ! There were no nails to be bought anywhere. Whereas
fOTthe value of one cigarette, which then cost up to ten marks, a large
family could visit the animal park, if on the other hand one actually
had the ten marks one could buy nothing. Anybody in those years who
tried to put together as small a thing as a rabbit hutch could tell you
all about it.

Rabbit is indeed the word, for in those famine years those were our
most 'valuable' animals. They used to delight the children, hopping
about in our rabbit compound, and we had to have a watchman there
all the time, for the sight of all those breeds of rabbit made visitors'
mouths water. The great word of the time now became ' compensate.'
To 'compensate' meant to barter. However, we had not so many
ostrich eggs at Stellingen that we could use them very freely, and they
were only brought into play when we simply had to get such things
as roof felting or some nails for repairs.

It is only today, when I turn the pages of a report on the animal park
of the time, that I realise what an enormous amount of minute work
our reconstruction absorbed. The greater part of the burden was
undertaken by Carl Heinrich. Thousands of new trees and shrubs soon
graced new lawns. Who, though, realises that for five days British
tipping trucks conveyed three thousand cubic metres of clay taken

226

ELEPHANT PROTEST AT MALMO

from the Stellingen bomb craters to help build the new skyscrapers
of Grindel in Hamburg? For weeks our elephants worked together
with powerful bulldozers, levelling out the ground and removing
piles of rubble. Thousands of holes were dug and filled with compost
before planting could be begun.

There were miles of hedges and fences to plant and erect, though
those were trifles compared with the reconstruction of our training
hall, our animal houses, not to speak of the ruined rock hills and the
swimming pools. As I write, my eye scans the painters' and carpenters'
statement for one month: one hundred and eighty-five garden park
seats repaired and painted, eighty-five feeding troughs mended, one
hundred and three mattocks and brooms fitted with handles . . . Think
of the cost of re-equipping the workshops of the blacksmiths, up-
holsterers, saddlers and carpenters, the money spent on new lawn
mowers, chaff cutters, hay balers. Heating equipment and cooling
equipment alike also made a big hole in the kitty.

To be fair, I must record that most of our old business friends and
also Hamburg officials helped us as far as they possibly could. For in-
stance, a cement works supplied a number of bags of their most
expensive grey powder for the repair of our bomb-damaged saurian
statuary.

We were also most loyally helped by the natural enthusiasm of
Hamburg folk. In the first year of the capitulation, when for seven
months the trams did not run on the Stellingen route, hundreds of
thousands of people made a pilgrimage to the animal park on foot. In
the starvation winter of 1946-7 we issued an appeal for acorn-
gatherers, and the results exceeded our most optimistic hopes. Busy
Hamburg children's little hands gathered in no less than one hundred
and twenty tons of acorns as foodstuffs for the animals. The
record was reached by Fuhlsbuttel Primary School, the pupils
of which gathered for us seventeen tons of acorns and two tons
of chestnuts.

Now there came a most unexpected messenger of woe. We had had
to put up with bomb damage and other war damage, but this new blow
was totally unforeseeable and shattering. A Scandinavian friend of ours,
passing through Altona Central Station, pressed a block of chocolate
into the hand of a boy and gave him a small parcel to bring us. In this
was a selection of Swedish newspapers. When I had glanced at them, I
caught my breath. For what did I read but that Carl Hagenbeck of
Stellingen was selling his Swedish property! And there was the

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ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

advertisement, by which we were actually made out to be offering for
sale the costly animal groups which we had hired to the Swedish
circus for their season. Offers were to be sent to the Swedish 'Fugitive
Capital Office* via Bank Director Ivar Vilen. And there was the
address: Drottninggatan 36, Malmo. We had received no intimation
whatsoever.

All my efforts to travel to Sweden to see about the return to Ger-
many of our property were now prevented by the refusal of visas.
Even a personal appeal addressed to the King of Sweden remained
without reply. Headed by Burgermeister Brauer, a number of Ham-
burg firms jointly the German Company Union, various business
houses and industrial houses museums and influential private persons
now besieged the Swedish Consul with representations, all without
result ! The British authorities referred us to the Swedes, the Swedes
to the Allies, the Allies again to the Washington Agreement, by
which German property abroad was to be set against German war
damage in other countries. I bombarded all possible institutions with
applications and protests, I visited every responsible office to which
I could obtain entry, trying to get them to see that a limited-period
hire of circus animals could not possibly come under the heading of
fugitive capital.

Meanwhile, what I was trying my best to do at top level, our ele-
phant tamer Hugo Schmitt in Malmo was trying to do on the ground
floor. For he too had seen the press advertisements. Full of indigna-
tion, he untethered his five elephants and marched down to the heart
of Malmo with them. Reaching the main street, the Kungsgatan, he
calmly thrust his whip and the elephant goad into a policeman's hands,
with the words: 'These are yours now/

In vain the staggered policeman tried to decline this trunk-swinging
present. Off Schmitt went. The elephants sauntered about, calmly
scratching their rumps on the corners of houses, during which
operation windows rattled and some lamp-posts got bent. The police-
man radioed for the police patrol car. This soon found Schmitt and
brought him back to his elephants under arrest. He was ordered to
take his elephants away. He countered by uttering a command, at
which the trumpeting elephants formed round him a barrier through
which nobody could now reach him. An angry and over-zealous
policeman drew his pistol, but then consideration of its ridiculous
small calibre and the possible effect on the already excited elephants
made him quickly put it back again.

228

ELEPHANT PROTEST AT MALMO

Very soon there were naturally dense crowds round the Kungs-
gatan, with press men busy with notebooks and cameras. An excite-
ment like this was something Mahno had not had for a long time.
Finally, the helpless police fetched Mr. Ivar Vilen, whose sale adver-
tisement had so outraged Mr. Hugo Schmitt, and by friendly words
and half promises this gentleman succeeded in getting Schmitt to take
the animals under his charge, when they calmly went back to their
stables.

Elephant protest at Malmol For two days the story was front-page
news throughout Scandinavia. Cartoonists were prolific with sug-
gestions as to how the elephants might best be used. There were hints
both for the police and the town scavenger service, but some papers
did also give the full story of the tragic background of the elephant
sensation.

Meanwhile, the dispersal of our property had already begun. John
Ringling-North, the nephew of my old friend, and today head of The
Biggest Show in the World, bought our tigers and elephants, giving the
tamers the choice of returning to the ruins of Germany or remaining
attached to their animals. Rudolf Matthies succeeded in getting into
touch with me about their decision. My reply was that they were to do
all they could to stay beside their animals, particularly since I had not
yet given up hope of getting our property back some day.

Our highly trained stock was knocked down for a mere song. Whole
groups of trained animals went for the price of a single camel. The
purchasers were principally Scandinavian circuses and zoos. The prices
were rather like buying a valuable blood horse at so much a pound. Of
course the proceeds were most painstakingly credited to the West
German Republic and set against reparations costs. The relative docu-
ments were deposited at Bonn and will in all likelihood long outlive
all the circus animals expropriated from us.

In the after- war years, circuses now sprang up on Germany's ruins
like hothouse mushrooms. There were a good three hundred of them.
Any man who could do a hand-stand or hitch a dancing bear to his
trailer caravan now pretentiously dubbed himself a circus manager.
Other significant changes in the circus scene had also taken place. The
Sarrasanis, father and son, were dead, their enterprise destroyed. At
Munich Carl Krone was denazified in his grave it cost two thousand
marks. Like many other circuses which had been touring East Germany,
Paula Busch in flight westwards suffered tremendous losses through
air strafing or being plundered by occupation soldiery. Now so-called

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ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

'organisers' men with good 'contacts* in official places and the
business world rose high in the social scale and commanded a high
price for their services. But though some smart people might succeed
in having Luftwaffe parachutes tailored into new tents, then by risky
barter operations acquiring electricity generators, heating systems,
tractors and suchlike equipment from Allied stores of war booty, and
also even such acquisitions as road worthy ambulance trucks, they
could still not obtain animals, trained or otherwise, for all the fat
bacon and coffee good currency in those days in the world.

The zoos of Germany had been combed away, and the frontiers
were closed. A postcard sent to Vienna's Schonbrunn Zoo came back
overprinted 'Prohibited business correspondence.' There was at the
time an order in force in Bavaria which made it impossible for us to
exchange a dwarf goat for a Cameroons specimen which the Straubing
Zoo possessed. So much for animal trade at the time.

Shortly before the expropriation of our circus animals, my boy
Carlo had gone to Sweden to represent us. He made his way back to
Hamburg only via imprisonment and internment camps. But though
back home, he was not allowed to engage in any 'leading activity' until
certain charges against him (which were without any foundation)
were cleared up. So Carlo turned night watchman, in the employ of
a Hamburg firm which lets out such services. In that capacity he was
without delay 'fixed' to serve a firm named Hagenbeck. The amuse-
ment which our good night watchman got out of this situation was
very heartening, for there seemed to be no regulation whatsoever
prohibiting him in his new capacity from entering the head office,
whether by day or night.

Now together with my sons I erected a large marquee at the
Dammtor station, and as the city's theatres had all been destroyed in
the war this became the largest tented theatre at the time in the whole
of Western Germany. We panelled out a pit and provided space for an
orchestra of thirty players, under the baton of a prominent radio
conductor. The canvas roof was hung across with white and gold flies,
partly as decoration, but also for acoustic reasons. Over the giant
stage rattled the 'Love Express,' full of popular actresses and actors
of film and stage. Iska Geri created her kangaroo dance, the only item,
however, which was even remotely reminiscent of our sixty-year-old
circus tradition. Conditions were still rough. In rainy weather our
corps de ballet reached the stage by way of the tunnel we had once used
for lions and tigers ! But eyes grew moist when Willy Fritsch, popular

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ELEPHANT PROTEST AT MALMO

film star of prewar days, came to the microphone with his charming
smile and sang : 'Such great events can be, they never are repeated
But when the evening performance was overrun by bebop youth and
jitterbug fans, with rattles and toy trumpets, and the tent re-echoed
as if three thousand irrepressible baboons were putting on a musical
turn, I stopped my ears.

Gradually now our old turns drifted back to us, as they at last got
free from service in the forces or from prison camps. They reappeared
on the surface, coming even from Russian mines, some of them after
hair-raising escapes, men who had all once sailed under Hagenbeck's
flag. There were also new faces. In the heart of a snowstorm, for
instance, a figure suddenly entered my office in khaki and pith helmet,
fresh from internment in Java. In strong Berlin speech he said:
'Thought I might pop the question, whether y' c'ld do with a tamer?
Used to do riding stuff. "The Three Rudolfos" one man, two
women. The man, that's me. Last job was with Isako, in a little Russian
circus. Joined 'em in Bombay, tamer died on the road, had to turn
my hand to everything. Worked without any tent. In the monsoons.
Indians made us one from palm leaves. Toured Singapore, Sumatra,
Java, Borneo, Philippines. Sixteen years of it. Up to 1946. All that
time, if I wanted to see a German, I had to look in the glass . . .'

He was a merry fellow, but when I questioned him I found that he
knew where to find schabrack tapirs and was familiar with the head
porter of the Taj -Mahal Hotel in Bombay, and all that acquaintance in
common decided it, so Rudolf Jurkschat became our youngest and our
best postwar animal tamer. In our Stellingen training hall he prepared
the animals, while in the Dammtor show he galloped across the stage
as the White Knight.

In the offices at Stellingen our old staff now sat in hat and coat
the rooms unheated and worked throughout the hours of daylight.
There was a coal shortage, there were electricity cuts. There was a
food shortage too. How I envied the humour of the man in the street
in those years of real need. I had been invited to Cologne to the first
postwar meeting of German circus managers. It was carnival time.
'We are the natives of Threezonesia, ' sang the merry Rhinelanders.
And they were right in their scorn. That is all we were now, in-
habitants of Three Zones. Our national flag had become letter C
in the international flag signals alphabet! The iron curtain had de-
scended right across our motherland, cutting off a fourth zone that
under Soviet administration from us. But yet the folk of Cologne

23*

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

sang. Though the wine might be both dear and tart, for a day or two,
at least, life seen through rose-tinted carnival specs was not so bad
after all.

Then the carnival president spotted me, and I had to take my place
on the barrel and greet my lusty compatriots with a song, thereby
earning a huge decoration and becoming honoris causa member of a new
association, though not, I trusted, to be followed up by yet another
questionnaire to be filled in ! But what was that the band was play-
ing, what were the folk of Cologne singing so gaily? ' Let's go round to
Hagenbeck's . . .' Now, that did give me new confidence. I began
really to put my back into the task of getting all our circuses on their
feet again.

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ONAGERS HAVE THE DEVIL IN THEM

NEW YEAR'S DAY, 1948, was celebrated on turnip whisky and roast
rabbit. In the animal park all the ruins had been cleared away. Fresh
lawns stretched where once had been bomb craters. Out of the ruins
and the central-heating pipes of the former main building Carl
Heinrich had made a fine new free corral for our North American
prairie buffaloes. And now from this auspicious day, a million letters
and postcards sent daily to all parts of the world bore a special Post
Office overprint of an elephant and the legend 100 Years of Hagenbeck.
This message stirred echoes of pride and satisfaction in us all.

In May, the then Mayor of Hamburg, Btirgermeister Brauer, and the
British Military Governor Berry opened an exhibition which we had
put up in the animal park to tell the story of those hundred years. The
press wrote that this was more than a mere matter of private business .
Hagenbeck's had become part of the cultural history of Hamburg. A
central exhibit was a natural-size reconstruction of the initial unit of
our enterprise: the St. Pauli seal pool of 1848. There was also a big
sequence recalling the 'folk' shows of peoples from all parts of the
world. Large wall-paintings told the story of our house animal
catching, early animal transport, the founding of Stellingen and the
conflagration of 1943 all this the work of our good friend the famous
animal painter, Wilhelm Eigener.

In the 'circus world tours' room the children all marvelled at the
scale models of the loaded Saarland and of our circus trains with their
gaily-coloured rolling-stock and all the animals on board. We pro-
cured all we needed from the ruins of the Hamburg, Kiel and Bremen
museums from 7,ooo-lb. bull walruses, with Eskimos harpooning
them from a kayak, to a complete taxidermist's workshop in which a
bison killed by bombs in our night of destruction was reconstructed,
an exhibit which was later to find a permanent home in a museum.
And from the basement of the Hamburg Art Gallery we resurrected
and borrowed Lovis Corinth's big painting of my father against his
Arctic Ocean Panorama complete with walruses.

In fact, the water pools of our park were now deserted. Or, rather,
we thought they were. For Arnulf Johannes, one of our animal

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ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

catchers, who though homesick for Africa was now with us at
Stellingen, provided us with a most enterprising surprise. He had
reported sick to our park superintendent and had not been on duty
for three weeks. But when, at the opening, after seeing the exhibition,
I wound up by a stroll through the animal park with my guests of
honour, what should I see come squalling towards me in the Arctic
Ocean Panorama, but six seals, which Johannes had caught single-
handed in the shallows of the Baltic. They certainly had better luck
than their predecessors a century earlier, for the wash-tub with which
those earlier seals had had to be content had grown into a small lake,
and the polar bears (among the few animals which had survived the
night of destruction) stared in amazement at this querulous centenary
surprise visit.

Besides good wishes from all over the world to mark this centenary,
there were also live presents from foreign zoos. John Ringling-North
had sent us eight sea-lions by air from California. Dr. Heinroth,
Germany's only lady zoo director, who had herself called a new zoo
to life among the ruins and rubble of Berlin, sent us an African
porcupine. Our most aged tokens, however, were those in the charge
of a friend from Valparaiso, coming from the far-off Galapagos Islands,
for the lads on a Chilean training ship had sent us five giant Galapagos
tortoises weighing from four to six hundredweight each.

The phosphorus burns of Nepali, the only living armoured rhinoceros
in Germany, had healed by now. Nepali weighed four tons. It was
hard to believe that in 1943 Carlo and his porters had carried him by
hand over the Himalayan passes. In the giraffe house our giraffe bull,
Hans, raised his head up to the four-metre mark thirteen feet on
the wall. He had been born shortly after the bombing. Today this
magnificent flourishing specimen of a Stellingen 'war child* measures a
good seventeen feet and must be the biggest giraffe bull ever in
captivity.

But for all that our centenary year began full of hopes, it was soon
to bring me care and grief. Suddenly, by insidious illness, Carlo, my
eldest son, was taken from us. I think I should have given up after so
many blows of fate, had it not been for Dietrich, his fourteen-year-
old son, the very spit of him, and now by his father's will my suc-
cessor. The task of being my grandson's counsellor and guide in his
education gave me new courage.

In our Stellingen training hall our animal trainers worked at high
pressure. The time-table was drawn up in three classes the hay-,

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ONAGERS HAVE THE DEVIL IN THEM

the fish- and the meat-eaters and by systematic work our four-
legged and four-flippered pupils were all taught to be performers.
Here too we tried out our polar bears, lions and brown bears in the
central cage, while in the paddock horse trainers worked with a team
of eight brown Holsteins and another team of twelve fiery Arabs
carefully selected at purchase for their colour. Here too we trained
zebus, camels and guanacos. The Californian sea-lions learned to do
their stuff on the horn organ, the instruments for which were by dint
of much effort safely smuggled through the iron curtain, while our
elephants tried their hand on a comical car, which instead of an
engine had a barrel organ under the bonnet and kettle-drums for tyres.

Then, all at once, overnight, like a sharp frost, currency reform
cut back all our apparent circus-world prosperity, and the number of
circus enterprises shrank suddenly. Artistes who preferred engage-
ments abroad and previously had shrugged their shoulders and rejected
our offers now became eager candidates for work. The new German
marks were scarce, but once again they were worth earning. The
previous day we had counted an animal park gate of eight thousand,
six hundred and sixty, now our booking office clerk gaped at every
rare visitor as if he were a Christmas tree, for now the entrance was
paid for in D-marks, as they were called. The first tram which came
out to Stellingen that day brought nobody. Nor did the second. Then
came a plump little matron, who had actually walked, and she bought
the first ticket with the new money. Two hundred and thirty-six
other Hamburg folk followed her example that day. On the morrow
there were a good thousand. After that, attendances rose steadily
again.

The year after the new currency came in, two German circuses
again rose alive Phoenix-like from the ashes Carl Krone and Carl
Hagenbeck. Once again our special orange-coloured trains began to
run between the Baltic and the Alps. Once again Adolf Martell
throned it in box office wagon No. 66 the same Martell who had
taken us through Japan with his paste pot, and subsequently let
millions of pesos, milreis, pesetas and piastres pass through his hands,
without a penny ever going into his own pocket. In the early postwar
years he had taken his place at the cash desk of the animal park, after
closing hour doing stage work as a witch in Humperdinck's Hansel
and Gretel, by which earning his daily bread !

Yes, now white-haired, there was that old circus Gypsy back with us
again. He had come through the war rather better than his youthful

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

eternalisation on the pediment of the monument on the Hamburg
Courts of Justice, for that had been pretty badly knocked about. After
his seventy-fifth birthday, he stopped dyeing his hair. That 'Devotee
of the Folk of the Road* had once just missed being affluent by a hair's
breadth. Indeed, it was by sheer negligence that he failed to follow
up and insist on his rights in a song which went round the world
with him. A thorough-going landlubber, he had been more than a
little seasick when during a stormy Atlantic crossing he scribbled
down his Stormy was the night and the seas rode high/ which today
is to be heard everywhere on barrel organs and wherever records are
played.

Now good solid D-marks rolled in at the box office, not that there
was not a lot to be learnt about this new postwar world. Towns
which my earlier experience had taught me to make a big detour
round and avoid now proved to be regular gold-mines, while on the
other hand there were old business cities in which previously we had
had four weeks' runs with full houses, but out of which we now had
to pull without delay. At that pile of rubble which, like many another
city, Emden then was, we had to get our elephants out of their stables
to keep the East Frisian peasants from Krumme Horn in their proper
queues, so great was the crowd seeking admission, breaking down the
outer fence and nearly overturning the box office wagon. Whereas
previously our audiences there had never been more enthusiastic than
to laugh inwardly, the seating now rattled with their hearty laughter.
Thus had war, the shift of industry and floods of refugees changed
the whole picture of our circus business.

When with my son I entered the paddock at Essen for our first
postwar performance visit, there was such a roar of applause that I
simply could not speak, I was so overcome. The Esseners had cer-
tainly not forgotten us, and that night we touched record takings.
For hundreds of thousands of the folk of the Ruhr metropolis the Carl
Hagenbeck Circus brought back a breath of their more carefree
younger days.

At last I was fortunate enough to secure an agreement with the John
Ringling-North circus by which we exchanged our mixed carnivore
group for the big tiger group of which I had been robbed in Sweden.
Sun-tanned and smart as a lord, coming straight from Havana, Rudolf
Matthies now rejoined us. He used to take his youngest tiger, one
which he had brought up himself, about on a lead. He counted it as
the one hundred and twenty-seventh animal he had reared from

ONAGERS HAVE THE DEVIL IN THEM

infancy. Indeed, he had wet-nursed this particular tiger on the bottle.
Baby tigers are blue-eyed and they must be suckled every two hours
or they make a terrible fuss, and one also has to finish the job properly,
which means giving them a painstaking massage and wash. One comes
to realise most concretely why tiger mummies have such tough, rough
tongues.

Our circus cook, Auntie Emmy, had also rejoined us. Emmy did
not cook only for me, but also for the giraffes, the chimpanzees, and
all the baby animals which for this or that reason needed the little
extra the piece of steak or the coddled egg for a baby tiger, the bowl
of gruel for a giraffe or the sweetened dish of tea for a sweet-toothed
chimpanzee. Emmy always had some creature to mother.

When they saw Aunt Emmy brandish her ladle, her flushed cheeks
bent over her pots and pans, and Franzl, her Viennese right hand,
busily pulling on his white waiter's jacket, the circus knew what it
meant: the old man was coming. My boy Erich was managing the
circus now, but it was still my delight every now and then to spend
a couple of days in my own road wagon, which was always taken round
with the others. I loved the scent of the sawdust and the odour of the
lions and tigers and also to hear the music of our faithful horses'
whinnying not to speak of the plaudits of the crowd.

In 1951 I made my last trip to the U.S.A. I travelled on the Nieuwe
Amsterdam. Once again I established an agency in New York, and, just
as after the first world war, I contrived to get mere correspondence
contacts on to a firmer footing. The fact that I had not gone out at
once in 194^ must not be put down to any lackadaisicalness on my
part. It was solely due to the fact that this time it was incomparably
longer as a German citizen before I had a passport and an American
visa in my hand.

I returned with some fine business deals in the bag, and when
Arnulf Johannes, our first animal catcher to set out for Africa after
the war was over, returned home with a large contingent we were
already in a position to resume our business with the zoos of the
United States. There was now rarely a week but some young fellow
turned up in search of employment as animal catcher. The fact was,
films of adventure and stories full of fantasy had so often depicted what
was surely not a very natural calling that I feel I should underline the
starker realities of our age.

When some ninety years ago the first animal catchers prospected
for us in Africa, it was admittedly the custom to buy the goodwill of

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ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

the local chiefs with presents, and get them to expose their own men
to the fangs of the animals. But that time has long passed away. The
face of Africa has changed fundamentally since then. Today hunting
is done by car, and the Masai, the Kikuyu or the Swahili who drives
his jeep at fifty miles an hour in chase of the giraffe, even deep in the
heart of inner Africa, knows all the wage rates paid where work is
going on building new motor-car roads, aerodromes and petrol
stations. In the coastal towns, the black workers are organised in their
unions, and you pay a high price for any overtime. In some ports,
meat prices have reached European levels. Whereas our animal
catchers once upon a time regularly used to count on shooting
sufficient game to feed their black porters and also the carnivores they
had caught, in recent years they have many a time been obliged to
release even captured hyenas, the feeding costs involved before the
next ship could transport the animals exceeding the value of the
beasts.

This is not the only obstacle. Some shipping freights have gone up
by several hundred per cent. Thereby the prices of the animals have
leapt. Today an African rhino costs sixteen thousand marks, a giraffe
from ten to fifteen thousand, an elephant from fourteen to twenty
thousand, and even a lion as much as three thousand. These are of
course not by any means fixed prices, for of course a lot depends on
fluctuating supply and also on demand.

The consequence of all this was that when now we needed to fill
gaps in our animal stock, and resume our former trading business,
Carl Heinrich directed his principal attention to the acquisition for
Stellingen of a new sort of stock, namely zoological rarities. In due
course his inquiries indicated that Persia was the country in which
the rare onager (Equus hemionus onager) was to be found. This is the
wild ass of Asia, which, together with the kiang and the kulan or
dzhigetai belongs to the almost vanished race of horse-donkeys. Years
before, these reddish-brown animals with their short upstanding manes
and the broad dorsal eel-stripe had vanished from the world's zoos.

Once he was sure we should find onagers in Persia, Carl Heinrich
flew out to Teheran with Arnulf Johannes to make preparations for
Carl Hagenbeck's first Persian expedition. This was a complete
success, and of it Heinz Heck, the well-known zoologist, director of
the Munich animal park at Hellabrunn, wrote : 'The reintroduction
of a large breeding group of onagers is an event in the history of zoos. '

When they had bought their cars for the chase, engaged Persian

238

ONAGERS HAVE THE DEVIL IN THEM

assistants and made all the many extensive preparations for their
expedition into the scorching hell of the Persian salt desert, urgent
business called my nephew back to Stellingen. However, a few weeks
later a transport aircraft flew the first onager foals to Hamburg and
the pilot handed Carl Heinrich a letter, which is worth giving as it
stands:

'We set out two days after you left, and have just succeeded in
finishing the job. We had travelled for two days and nights, taking
turns at the wheel, Hossein and myself in the first jeep, in the
second our mechanic and another man. After us went the baggage
truck. It was a good idea to send out a camel caravan into the salt
desert in advance to establish water and fuel depots. By the time we
reached our last caravanserai, where the world ended and the vast
expanse of the desert lay before us, we used up a good four thousand
litres of petrol (eight hundred and eighty gallons).

'We made our capturing trips from that base. A native maintained
that he had once seen onagers to the north. After a good hour's run
we parted company from our other jeep, which was to drive the
animals towards Hossein and myself. Using our field glasses, we saw
nothing whatsoever from nine to five in the afternoon, except that
we kept seeing mirages. Only a few hundred yards away, villages,
trees, lakes, water, and we saw them a hundred times in the course
of the day. Many a time we were on the point of getting ready for a
dip, to get rid of the perspiration, but it was all illusion, a treacher-
ous play of light, fata morgana, the shimmering of the hot air over
the desert.

* Whereas in August the temperature at Teheran reaches up to
1 2o F. in the shade, out there, without exaggeration, it goes up to
140 F. Except that there is really no shade. No trees, not even a
bush. Previously, I had been convinced that the French Sudan and
the Red Sea ports were the hottest spots of the earth's surface, but
that is nonsense.

'Here lives the onager, and apart from this, no animal, no bird,
no insect, not even a scorpion. Dogs and cats had been taken out to
that caravanserai, but in a few days they had always died from the
heat. I myself have hardly any skin left on my hands, for I forgot
your advice about gloves, and during our neck-breaking drives I
always had to cling to the burning hot metal- work of the jeep. We
cooked our eggs in the hot sand. This is the absolute truth.

239

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

'Suddenly, there was a cloud of dust high in the air, and we saw
a small herd of onagers galloping down on us. Then we forget every-
thing else, and I soon enough had my catching pole in my scorched
hands. At last, after all those weeks of preparations and days of in-
action, some of which you too experienced, we had reached our
goal. Hossein drove on and we were soon among the onagers,
which were in swift flight. Hossein drove like a devil, but sensibly.
He brought me in so close to the game I wanted that one might
have thought he had never done anything else in his life; the co-
operation was wonderful and we both enjoyed it.

'The first one I managed to lasso was a fully grown mare. I leapt
down from the car, hobbled her and on we went. Then at last we
saw the first foal in the herd. Hunting that down scarcely took three
minutes. When the dust cleared, I had it in my arms. I got it into
the car and off we roared again. The herd doubled back and we

after it. At 30 m.p.h. our jeep bounced badly off the hummocks
and over the pot-holes, and in such country it was impossible to do
more. For three-quarters of an hour the onagers kept that speed up. I
remember glancing at the clock and seeing that we were doing
precisely 29^ m.p.h., but not a drop of perspiration appeared on
those animals' skins. Incredible, at that temperature and that
pace.

'In the course of the rest of the day we caught two more foals

240

My brother Hcinrich Hagenbeck with polar hears and a walrus
at Stel linger)

Three generations of Hagenbecks. Standing [left to right], Girl Heinrich
Hagenbeck (nephew of Lorcnz Hagenbeck), Erich Hagenbeck (son), Mrs.
Heike Hagenbeck (wife of Carl Heinrich), Mrs. Hlse Hagenbeck (wife),
Dietrich Hagenbeck (grandson). Sitting, Lorenz Hagenhcck, Evelyn
Hagenbeck (grand-daughter)

A valuable passenger from the Persian salt desert. The first onager

foal to set foot ir^Hamburg, being led from the airdaft by my nephew,

Carl Hrnrich and my grandson, Dietrich

ONAGERS HAVE THE DEVIL IN THEM

and a grown stallion. First we took the young animals back to base,
then one of the jeeps brought in an adult onager. That cost us more
sweat and labour than all the eight foals altogether which we caught.
Onagers have the devil in them. A maddened zebra stallion is a
lamb in comparison with one of those. They butted the fencing like
rams. This stallion lashed out, kicking everything within reach,
snapping with menacing teeth, then suddenly took a standing jump
and cleared the wall round the caravanserai and that was eight
feet high and off it raced! I never saw anything like it. It was
unbelievable.

'The onagers drink salt water exclusively and even eat the hard
salt clay. We got to Teheran the day before yesterday. I shall give
the pilots instructions as to feeding and other attention. I am
sleeping with my little nags tonight, and shall put up their stalls in
the aircraft tomorrow. There is a terrible lot of room to spare inside.
The mechanic and the cook whom we took on together in Teheran
were wash-outs. They backed out. At the last moment before we
left for the desert they were afraid of their own pluck. I have put
our cars in for repairs here. They all have spring, axle and trans-
mission troubles. It was truly a hell-ride. When we left, Hossein's
Teheran friends were most scornful about his setting out on so
hopeless an attempt as catching onagers. Now we are the cynosure
of all eyes and the whole press is full of our expedition to the salt
desert. You keep your fingers crossed, so they all arrive safe and
sound. Those little nags will delight your heart. They are indeed
more horse than ass; they don't hee-haw at all, they whinny. I
shall expect your wire, meantime will load up with six thousand
litres (thirteen hundred and twenty gallons) of gas, then off we go
north to the Caspian. Hossein is going to be in on this too, and I
also hope to get some leopards there and perhaps a maned tiger as
well.'

With that first Persian expedition 1 have run rather ahead of my
story, so now I will give a quick glance back at the fortunes of our
circus. We had already toured the remaining West German towns in
our first years of touring. Switzerland was the first foreign country to
which we could now make a return visit. That, however, was not so
simple a matter, and before we had had time to wash the feet of our
hooved and cloven-footed animals with soda-water, so as to be able to
satisfy the strict veterinary requirements of that dazzlingly clean little

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ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

country, I received a letter. This was from a Swiss circus friend who
had so far been of exemplary conduct, but now, if I dared to take my
circus over 'his* frontier, threatened an end to our friendship. More-
over, he plastered our road with obstacles. However, these the Swiss
Government service removed one by one with such courtesy and
fairness that today we all look back on our successful run at Basle-
Birsfelden with real pleasure.

'Hagenbeck is a name which rings loud in the circus world, ' wrote
the press of Antwerp the following year, when we took our show to
Belgium. We were out at Berchem, a suburb of Antwerp, where,
after the first world war, Sarrasani's circus was destroyed by fire.
We were welcomed as friends, but, owing to the rate of exchange of
the Belgian franc, the receipts were far below those of our Swiss visit.

Now, however, with the close of this fifth touring season, we re-
solved to give our touring circus a rest. Our name gives the public
the right to expect from us not only a first-class circus programme,
with numerous performing animal groups, but also a rich menagerie.
But the heavy costs and the large personnel which this demands already
meant that West Germany of today was too small a field to work in.
In that restricted area there were at least twenty-five more or less
significant circus enterprises, not to speak of tented ice revues and
variety shows. Further, the crash of the Busch Circus, which was
broken up at Manila, indicates the difficulties which with present high
sea freights stand in the way of oversea circus tours. Nor is the
political atmosphere everywhere abroad yet satisfactory for German
circus companies to be able to travel unhindered. Purely business con-
siderations therefore persuaded us in future to concentrate all our
energies on the Stellingen Animal Park, on capturing new animals and
on trading in animals.

In spite of this decision to curtail the circus, however, work in our
Stellingen animal training school continued. For one thing, this pro-
vides us with the possibility of showing visitors our animals in all their
movements. In addition, even in animals play and occupation are the
best specific against boredom. The higher the intelligence they reach,
in fact, the greater is their need to be occupied. This is a factor which
must be taken account of, even if only in the form of scratching posts
in the carnivores' cages, balls for the bears to play with, and gym-
nastic appliances for chimpanzees. Otherwise, illnesses develop.

My father, of course, devoted great attention to these matters at
an early date and, moreover, on purely empirical grounds, but in

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ONAGERS HAVE THE DEVIL IN THEM

recent years scientists have turned more and more seriously to the
study of animal psychology generally, and this has recently moved
closer and closer to that of human beings.

In the foreword to his extremely interesting book on Animal
Psychology in Zoo and Circus Professor Dr. H. Hediger, the well-known
Swiss zoologist and director of the Zurich Zoo, says : 'The researcher
of this field seems to me like a man exploring caverns forging ahead,
he has penetrated into a most interesting chamber. But as he feels his
way forward ahead of him he perceives still more vast halls, the
approaches to which will one day suddenly open up and astound.'

WE'LL SHOOT AT HAGENBECK'S

THE SHOOTING was harmless it was the transformation of our animal
park into an open-air film studio. Poison in the Zoo was the name of the
film, and the story was based on the never-explained murder of
animals in the Frankfurt Zoo.

I am, alas, rather past the age at which one gets excited about film
stars, but all the same my Stellingen staff were one with me. Irene von
Meyendorf was not merely an actress of great beauty and charm, she
also had the makings of a first-class animal tamer in her. In the film,
however, the leading stars were our animals. Indeed, our elephants
acted being poisoned with such realism that the Society for the Pre-
vention of Cruelty to Animals actually suspected the producer of
having gone a bit too far with his verisimilitude. That of course was
nonsense, but he certainly took some wonderful sequences of our park.
At the dramatic climaxes, however, he had recourse to sheer trickery.
For instance, a well-fitting nylon costume transformed a harmless eel
into a dangerous hooded cobra.

What, however, few seem to know is that Stellingen had also much
earlier been fairy godmother to the German silent film. But of course
it was a good forty years since Fritz Lang, later famous in Ufa and
Hollywood work and producer of New Babylon, made a three-decker
adventure film entitled The Golden Spider, which was shot in the 'Wild
West' of Stellingen 's rocky landscape!

Year in, year out, my grandson Heinrich Umlauff here produced
wonderful background landscapes for our folk exhibitions. The
Sphinx and the Pyramids, Eskimo igloos, Negro kraals and the ruins of
Luxor were all set up for the summer season, made from plaster of
Paris, laths and wire netting, all provided from the stock of I. F. G.
Umlauff's Museum of Trade. Here Werner Krauss, Harry Piel, Anita
Berber and all the rest of them took their first steps in film work.
When today I come upon our moss-grown statue of the Buddha on our
Japanese Island, I still seem to see a fair maiden kneeling there before
a stern high priest. That enchanting Madame Butterfly of 1919 was Lil
Dagover. In 1953 on the same patch of soil television cameras shot the
tragic meeting of Lieutenant Pinkerton and his geisha girl.

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WE'LL SHOOT AT HAGENBECK'S

In this case, Carl Heinrich had simply telephoned his consent to the
television studio, but quite forgot to inform our park superintendent.
Hence one morning that poor fellow could not believe his eyes when
suddenly a jeep full of American soldiers, with legs dangling outside,
dashed in through the Japanese temple gates.

Til teach you manners/ he roared, and followed the threat with a
flood of the sort of blunt English you can pick up from stevedores in
New York Harbour.

The gum-chewing Americans pulled up sharply. 'Okay, chief,'
they cried and then followed a stream of good Hamburg dialect 1

Somewhere between these two Butterfly episodes there was also the
evening when I met my good friend the animal-story teller Paul
Eipper and his Swiss counterpart', Bengt Berg, in Berlin's Hotel Eden,
and the talk was of animal films, by which I mean serious animal films,
for I always feel badly cheated when I see Indian rhesus monkeys in an
African setting, or else in an Indian setting an elephant with such
enormous flap ears that one would recognise it as African.

'What on earth am I to film now? 1 was Bengt Berg's question, for,
as he said, his Abu Marub had to have a sequel.

'Go to Nepal,' I replied, 'and film the last Indian armoured rhino-
ceros. Hurry, before the race is entirely wiped out. My boy Carlo has
just obtained a permit to capture a young one for us. '

Off went Berg, contacted Carlo somewhere in the Indian jungle,
and wrote that fine book The Last Rhino.

Soon after this I found myself in New York again, and was strolling
along Broadway, where every year since I first saw it new skyscrapers
had sprung up like mushrooms. A dazzling neon advertisement enticed
me into a cinema, and the title of the film was Tiger Hunting in India.
It really was remarkable. The sound track had obviously been added
later, and with a frivolity which has only tended to die out in recent
years. For latterly, among other films coming from America, we have
had the superlatively photographed animal films of Walt Disney. The
sound track of that tiger-hunting film simply did not fit the animals
shown. Indian rhesus monkeys had been given the voices of the roaring
apes of Brazil, which is rather like giving a silent film of Munich
brewers' draymen a sound track in Chinese.

At the same time, the photography was superb. Hunting elephants
put up a rhinoceros. Like an antediluvian monster, the creature raced
through the jungle. These were pictures of a beauty I had never before
seen. But, unfortunately, to make the film still more exciting, the

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

Hollywood boys had felt obliged to mix in some stills of a tiger hissing.
But for this they had not taken the large Bengal tiger, but its diminutive
Sumatran cousin, and this too a specimen which, judging by its coat,
had had rather a long confinement in an old-fashioned zoo. Brazilian
parrots and African chimpanzees made my displeasure complete.
Going out to smoke a cigar in the foyer, whom should I find but the
manager of the cinema, so I told him the things which had displeased
me. He asked me for my address and promised to send my criticism
to the film studio.

Some months later I was rung up at Stellingen by the. German Tobis
Film Company. They had received that tiger hunt film from America
with the request to have a new sound track made and fresh montage. A
couple of days later, a mobile unit came out. I saw the film again, made
precise notes, and though it would have been too much to correct
every detail, I was able to indicate how to re-do the most important
sequences.

We began work at three o'clock one morning, as at that time of day
there would be no factory sirens or street noises to interfere. We took
up a position near the elephants, and I had a tiger brought round in a
cage- wagon. The scene was entitled 'The tiger attacks a hunting
elephant. ' The first thing to record was the background noise of the
elephant crashing its way through the forest. Some dry sticks were
laid down, I took an elephant gently by the ear, and led him over them.
But the sound-track man shook his head. It was all wrong. And when I
listened myself, I found that the snapping of real branches sounded
more like machine-gun fire than anything else via the microphone.
Our ponderous actor was then required to walk over mere brush-
wood and there was our right sound !

Next came imposition of the sound of the tiger's attack. Into this
we needed to mix both elephant trumpeting and the roaring of the
tiger, together with crashing branches and the chatter of monkeys.
The latter was to be the background noise, on which I superimposed
elephant trumpeting by the simple device of tickling my elephant's
front feet, for that is the beast's most sensitive part, and my efforts
immediately produced an agonised bellowing. To that it was not at all
difficult to add the roaring tiger. All we had to do was to have a keeper
stick a fine lump of fresh meat on a feeding fork, take off his shoes,
and creep softly past the cage-wagon that tiger roared all right.

A little ingenuity also provided us with the sound of the scene in
which a large crocodile emerges hissing from the water and with two

246

WE'LL 4 SHOOT AT HAGENBECK'S

snaps of his jaws snaffles a couple of ducks. Here is the sound track
recipe for such an incident. A light tap on the crocodile's snout pro-
duces your outraged hiss. A slap on the water with a board produces
his emergence. And the ducks? As simple as pi. All you need do is to
take one finger and tickle the part where the eggs come out; you
will get your death- throe quacking without fail. The tests worked
perfectly. The film unit had reckoned on three weeks* work. By
breakfast the whole job was done !

Many are the films which have been shot at Stellingen or with our
help, many too the television shows. One of the finest of these was
Cecil B. deMille's great American colour film The Greatest Show on
Earth. Here, through our animals and tamers, we were unwilling
collaborators. That film, as it Happens, reminded me vividly of my
own young days in American circus work. However, it did bring
about another meeting with Minjak. In the German dubbing of that
film her name remained the same, but even without that I would have
known her from a hundred other elephants. Minjak, expropriated in
Sweden, was born at Stellingen. Now she had been filmed in the
biggest circus in the world, and was the star of all the other animals
in it. Her foot swayed menacingly over the head of a girl artiste. She
carried her principal producer, another girl performer, in her mouth.
And she went through it all as magnificently as she had originally
learned in our Stellingen school. When I saw that film, I found myself
drying my eyes in the kindly darkness of the cinema.

BREAK DOWN THE FRONTIERS!

I SHOULD never have found the time to write these reminiscences, had
a fall while out hunting on Luneburg Heath not brought it home to me
that at the age of seventy-three I was now very much a veteran, and as
there were other Hagenbecks to take on it was high time I retired to a
quiet old age. My legs were no longer so obedient as they used to be,
a sad admission for an old globe-trotter and passionate horseman.
When the year before this my old friend Wilhelm Filchner had paid
me a visit I envied him his vigour, and a few days later was shocked to
learn of his car accident near Celle. Now we two old boys were both
on our backs, exchanging wishes for a speedy recovery. We were
both of us still possessed by a desire to roam the wide world which
refused to be suppressed. He wanted to go to Tibet, I to Australia,
the only part of the earth which I had never seen.

Meanwhile, the personal mail kept piling up on my desk, and in the
drawer the little boxes of my grand-nephew and grandson were
waiting for the postage stamps which when I got down to it I should
divide between them. Every letter, however odd, was to be answered
after which the more remarkable ones would find a place in my
album of curiosities. Let us peep inside that!

'Dear Carl Hagenbeck,

'I should very much like to have a monkey, a real one with lice,
please write and tell me how much a little one costs. And also what
a monkey likes to eat best. If the monkey does not cost more than
$D. marks, So pfennigs, he should send it at once.**

'Dear Carl Hagenbeck,

'May I tell you that I have the same name as your giraffe Adele.
Please stop making my name public property like that.

'Yours very truly,
'(signed) Adele Senf.'

* This is the text of the facsimile illustration. Translator.

248

BREAK' DOWN THE FRONTIERS 1

&e&e/y (fort
JcA vnodifa. qvme sujn&n -

^ Jbfil*

'I wish to inquire whether you can supply me with five to ten
each of wood-ticks, fleas and bed-bugs. If you can meet me, kindly
inform me how much you are asking, postage and packing in-
clusive/

*One of the lions in your lion house urinated and sent his water
straight over my blouse. I have had to have everything dry cleaned,
as it stank horribly. I put it to you is this necessary?*

'Yesterday in your animal park I was informed that a young seal
is called Moses. That will not do ! For Moses was a chosen man, who
clearly fulfilled the Creation plan and moreover gave us the Ten
Commandments. I have often been very annoyed when people give
their dogs human names. A man may be sitting on a bench and
another comes along and sits down beside him and then addresses his
dog as 'Rolf,' while the man who was on the seat first is also called
Rolf; moreover, his name is consecrated by the sacrament of
baptism. That sort of thing creates distressing situations.'

For our most delicious letter, however, we had to thank a little
fellow called Heiner. Little Heiner was in his first year at school at
Ellerau, near Hamburg. He loved listening when teacher was talking
to the second class, which occupied the same room, and so he over-
heard the story of the creation of the earth. In his letter he said :

formerly the whole earth was all dark, so dear God first made

ANIMALS ARE MY LIFE

Light. Then came Heaven and Earth. Now dear God also wanted
water. He created Water and Dry Land. He also made Grass and
Trees, then the Lights in the Heavens too. Finally, He created the
Animals and after that He made Mr. Hagenbeck because He had
to have somebody to look after them.'

If little Heiner rather got Hagenbeck and Adam mixed, do not
adults often confuse us with millionaires ? I know our huge animal
park, covering seventy acres, is worth many millions. But we have
never been millionaires in cash. The tax authorities see. to that.

On Saturdays, when crowds of twenty to thirty thousand people
swarm through our park, I have often heard wonderful ad hoc esti-
mates of our annual takings. How I wish they were right, for if so we
could have realised many of our new plans much more quickly. But as
owners of a private animal park we have always had to turn every penny
over twice. Owing to our geographical position rather far north
our summer takings, though ample, are badly offset by seven winter
and transitional months, which easily swallow the summer profits.

If of recent years our revenue has increased considerably, and even
exceeded the record figure of 1914, this is due to the buses which
now bring so many hundreds and thousands to our very gate. Round
the animal park we have even been obliged to establish parking and
camping areas. Over the camping tents of our many visitors we see the
bright colours of nearly every country of Europe within easy reach.
Today it is our Scandinavian visitors who top the list here I include
the Finns and buses roll in direct from Stockholm, Copenhagen,
Oslo and Helsinki.

In the past few years, Carl Heinrich has enriched the park with a
number of new compounds. The open enclosures of the bisons, the
guanacos and the giraffes, and above all the tigers' jungle, have added
richly to the list of objects of interest which now annually bring
about one and a half million visitors in. There are in the world alto-
gether some four hundred zoos, and among these there are richer
zoos and there are zoos with larger grounds. But still when people
want to found a new zoo they come to Stellingen to see how to do it.

Early in the morning, while there are few visitors about, I love to
ride through the familiar paths, for my legs are now inclined to fail
me. It is a gentle sort of ride, but one of the pleasures it offers me is to
have a veteran keeper come to my window for a yarn and give me
news of his animals. I also see my grandson and successor Dietrich at

BREAKDOWN THE FRONTIERS!

his work, and Carl Heinrich tells me the news concerning us both.

But for all the many times I have been through this park, I still find
something new every time. Just now, on the bank of the artificial
river in the tigers' jungle, I observed one of the brilliantly striped big
cats fish out a bream with a swift swing of his paw. A fisherman tiger.
Tigers love fish quite as much as our domestic cats do. There was also a
proud swan mother piloting three mousy grey balls of wool along,
while a fourth rode contentedly on Mother's back, and there were
swamp turtles, sunning themselves on a warm stone. It seems only
yesterday that .we installed the young cygnet on the goldfish pond
where the Japanese Island stands and see, but already she has grown
up and there is increase.

At the quarantine station, the arrival of animal transports provides
the occasion for interesting conversations with our animal catchers
and with our own and the Government veterinary surgeons. And when
the weather is wild and the rain lashes down on the roof of my car, I
often have a lovely sight: our elephant herd's trunks flourished high
in the air as they happily trumpet and roll with delight in the clay mud
by the shore. This mire is the best of all creams for thick-skinned
creatures, and they simply revel in it.

Sometimes I come upon my most intimate old girl-friend, Meni.
She is only fifty in my eyes quite a young piece. We both have our
memories in common, for she was once our best-of-all working
elephant. She is familiar with loading ramps in four continents.
Indeed, she has often had to build them where there were none. Later
in life she came to levelling out bomb-torn ground and hauling away
dud bombs. She has ploughed our arable land, and on my seventieth
birthday she serenaded me with a barrel organ. Now here she comes,
like a faithful nannie, leading a young African elephant by a leading
string as thick as your arm. He is rather an undisciplined fellow, a
recent capture, and he tugs all ways. He looks as if he would like to
turn somersaults, he is so spirited, when suddenly, slappp! and Meni
has given him such a box behind his enormous rhubarb-leaf flap ear.
Now then, pay attention, won't you, do what your auntie tells you!

In the training hall a new four-flippered sea-lion is practising his
horn piano. The tune is still the old familiar one ('My cocked hat
has three corners'), but then, these are still conservative animals.

Now we are at the children's playground, and here comes a crowd
of excited kiddies. With gleaming eyes the boys and girls steer their
miniature cars over the miniature track. The riding elephants go their

ANIMALS ARE MY DfFE

rounds, the brightly painted horses of the roundabouts gyrate, and
the organ blares out that song which has brought the generations to
Stellingen 'Let's go round to Hagenbeck's 1 '

Recently, Carl Heinrich and I sat in our new reception building
at the main entrance, again expecting an august visitor. The President
of the West German Union, Professor Theodor Heuss, had promised
to visit us. Before me lay ready our visitors' book of honour, bound in
elephant hide, and with our arms embossed. Carl Heinrich undid the
heavy fastener and we turned the pages.

It began with 1907. In that year the Countess von Bismarck brought
her children to Stellingen. Prince Alexander von Oldenburg travelled
from Gagry in the Caucasus to us. Indeed, the animal park seems to
have been specially intended for princes, for in they came in that year,
from Prussia, Monaco, and the Netherlands, some on official visits,
others incognito, and among the signatures we found the picturesque
designs of Japanese and Chinese writing. There too were the signatures
of the Crown Prince and his consort. I still recall their being photo-
graphed with a baby tiger. Yes, and there is the sweeping signature of
the last Kaiser, followed by that of the Empress. It was she who
opened our famous ostrich farm. Every name awakens memories.
1 Two things to be seen,' the unforgettable tenor Enrico Caruso wrote
in the book in 1908, 'are the Germans and Hagenbeck's.' Hamburg's
biggest shipper, creator of the Hamburg- America line, Albert Ballin,
was here, and so were Hans Luther, Chancellor of the Reich, who
signed the Locarno Pact, and Thomas A. Edison, the brilliant American
inventor. They all came. Among them I find the signatures of Scandi-
navian monarchs and German princes and counts, of these the most
famous being that of Count Zeppelin. When he visited us he little
thought that before starting on its round-the-world cruise a great
airship of his invention would circle in farewell over our animal park,
when all our polar bears stood on their hind legs and stared in amaze-
ment at the big silver cigar which made so much noise in the sky.
Anna Pavlova the great ballerina, Lil Dagover and Suzanne Rocke-
feller all took out their pens here, and President von Hindenburg's
signature stands next that of aged Field-Marshal von Mackensen.

In spirit I can still see this train of personalities enter the main
entrance. Brilliant uniforms, exotic costumes, rustling silks, trim
civilian clothes, but, once off their thrones, their chairs, their high
places, men just like us all, enjoying all that at Stellingen one animal
friend had to offer others.

BREAK t)OWN THE FRONTIERS!

Hamburg, the Harbour, Hagenbeck, here was a triple assonance
which gave our native city world fame. Today, whenever I hear that
one of our animal catchers is expected into port I have to go down to
the Elbe again. The road takes me through St. Pauli, the playground
of my childhood, then by the magnificent embankment road to Schulau.
There I stop the car and through my glasses watch the steamer come in
from the Baltic up the river, and hear the loud-speakers at Will-
kommen-Hoft sonorous over the water: Welcome to Hamburg
Harbour. ' From the upper deck I see a sun- tanned man waving. There
are animal boxes on deck, and I am suddenly as young as I was fifty
years ago when on the s.s. Ehrenfels I brought home my first elephants.
Old Michel is still there, the seagulls croak, the tide rises and falls as
it did then, the only difference is that in the meantime I have turned
into 'old Hagenbeck.'

Recently I was visited by an American broadcast radio reporter who
was collecting what he thought were celebrities. He wanted me to tell
his microphone what I believed in. He thought he was going to be able
to give his hearers the answer to a question I have been trying to
answer all my life.

'When I was young,* is what I said, 'upbringing and tradition
all tended to build up a belief in God, in the German Kaiser and in
the Fatherland. Much travel spread over many years and frequent
lengthy stays in the United States of America later made me en-
thusiastic about what seemed to be the rather freer way of life of
the Americans. Many years later still, I once found myself seated
opposite a most gracious and clever lady in the Imperial Palace in
Tokyo and on that occasion I heard words which suddenly opened
my mind to a strange world and an attitude of mind where our
European measures proved useless. During that Far Eastern voyage
of mine I realised that the roads to God are many and also that there
are many ways of governing humanity.

'This I was reminded of further when, coming in from the sea,
on one occasion I saw the gleaming statue of Christ towering over
the Bay of Rio de Janeiro, on another the giant form of the Daibutsu
of Kamakura, on yet another, when I stood before the Cathedral at
Ulm, or, yet again, before the Pyramids of Gizeh. Those are all
symbols in stone of views of the world extant or lost, about that
riddle over which the peoples of the world have ever racked their

ANIMALS ARE MY

'This, however, is not the place for me to make an assault on
precise judgments about such things. I would rather say that I have
been happy to find men in every part of the world who were good
friends to me. By this I mean friends who even in times of tre-
mendous outbursts of hatred among the peoples did not turn their
backs on me. It was knowing such men as these, some of them of the
simplest origin, and everywhere in the world, that gave me faith
in those hours of utter despair into which evil teachings and
military technique would otherwise have thrust me.

'Today we pat ourselves on the back for being able to fly round
the world in a matter of hours, yet we sometimes need several
months to assemble all the necessary visas, certificates and rubber
stamps. Yet, when I first went to India, half a century ago, all I
needed was a steamship ticket !

'So my cry is: Down with the frontiers! Create understanding,
practise tolerance and let every people be happy after its own
fashion. That, simply summed up, is what life has taught me. There
is no such thing as an "American way of life," just as there is no
such thing as a German way, by which to give the world back its
health nor are there any proletarians of all lands straining to
unite! Most watchwords, most symbols, most monuments are
merely evidence of the wrong roads which from time to time man-
kind tries. Besides, the world is still full of beauty and unsolved
problems, among which it is the zoological ones which hold my
attention.

'So please forgive an old circus fellow,' I concluded, in my little
homily to the American reporter's microphone, 'this perhaps
rather banal-sounding comparison : If with a team of a couple of
dozen folk all of different nations, religions and political views I
could spend fifty years making seven world tours, to everybody's
satisfaction and delight, it ought to be feasible to solve the present
problem of international co-operation on a much larger scale than I
see any attempt being made at the present juncture.'

There is one feature that men have in common with animals:
forcible methods of training generally cost the trainers their lives.
With love, understanding and well-filled stomachs one can achieve
the greatest results. That is what I believe and I would be grateful if
you would make use of my little circus example to that end.

THE END

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